


Poppin'Onwards

by Symantra



Category: BanG Dream! (Anime), BanG Dream! Girl's Band Party! (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Drama, Future, Gen, Graduation, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-02-07 08:23:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18616843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Symantra/pseuds/Symantra
Summary: In her first year at Hanasakigawa Girls' Academy, Kasumi Toyama brought together the five people who would become the girls' band Poppin'Party. Along with Saya, Tae, Arisa, and Rimi, she found her "star beat." And they found it too, though for the most part they just agreed with Kasumi because only she understood what the star beat was.Almost three years later, as the end of high school draws near and every to-be graduate's mind turns toward the future, ambition, dreams, and reality begin to wear away at what's good and well. Cracks begin to form in a unity formed over two years of closeness. Poppin'Party bends dangerously close to the breaking point under the strain of staying together while their worlds evolve. All they can do is continue playing even as the rhythm changes, even when it's nearly lost, all while the sand in the hourglass continues to fall.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "In a blink of an eye, the seasons ran,  
> A painful sandglass;  
> Without anyone noticing,  
> Time continued falling...  
> What will be left when it's all over?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Setsunai Sandglass by Poppin'Party is a song I like quite a lot for all of its aspects: its vocals, instrumentals, bittersweet lyrics, and importance to Poppin'Party as characters who grow continually. The lyrics especially were absolutely _instrumental_ in the shaping of this story.
> 
> Because of that, I've included a link to the full version of the song as well as a translation of the lyrics into English. Please give it a listen.
> 
> [Setsunai Sandglass on Soundcloud (heh, SSS)](https://soundcloud.com/kokoro_tsurumaki/setsunai-sandglass)   
>  [Setsunai Sandglass lyrics by Nine](https://mikannotorange.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/poppinparty-setsunai-sandglass-english-lyrics-translation/)   
> 
> 
> * * *

Strong sun, drooping clouds, the scent of water in the air. Summer that year decided to linger rather than taper out by the end of August. Shed cicada husks clung to trees that were still decked out in green autumn-tinged leaves. Hiding from the sun under the eaves of her house, Arisa lay on the veranda, enjoying the sun on her face and legs. A light-blue rayon sundress pooled around her knees, smooth and light like silk, perfect for the summer heat.

With only a week left in August, her summer break was almost over. If Arisa were an American student, she would be just about to start her senior year. But in Japan, school started in April and finished in March, so her year was only about halfway done. And waiting for her at the end of it—

“So, Kasumi...” She spoke to her friend, bandmate, and frequent house guest, Kasumi Toyama. “What are you planning to do after you graduate?”

“Huh? Um...” Kasumi’s response involved a variety of noises, none particularly meaningful. “Hm... What are you planning to do, Arisa?”

“What, you’re not even gonna try to answer before turning it around?!”

—was graduation, the final event of their high-school years: the date on which they would be considered students of Hanasakigawa Girls’ Academy for the very last time. Some people said it was bitter while others said it was sweet. Arisa didn’t quite know whether she thought of it as bitter, sweet, or both; she was mostly preoccupied with figuring out what was going to happen with Poppin’Party.

Arisa had brought the subject up to Kasumi out of a little more than plain curiosity. They were headed for a series of literally life-changing events.

Kasumi lived wholly in the present, occasionally setting her eyes on something in the near future. Arisa could guess the words heart-pounding and sparkling would be in her answer somewhere, but they needed to be realistic too. It was about time they started thinking more about what they were going to do with their lives, since the real world was nothing like high school, or so she had heard. Along with opening the whole world up for them, graduation would also yank the rug out from under their feet if they ventured out into the real world thinking they could keep improvising on the fly as they were now.

And since Kasumi was here today—these days, she always was—today was the perfect time to bring it up and plant the thought in her mind. Because Arisa had a feeling Kasumi hadn’t given it a single thought yet.

“My own plans...” Arisa started, trying to sound as if she hadn’t rehearsed the conversation a dozen times. “It depends, I guess. I don’t care as much about school as a lot of people, but I wouldn’t mind going to university.”

She tried to sound nonchalant when really, the idea of their band and her friends moving on to this stage of their lives still cowed her. The only reason she could give her answer so easily was because she had already slept on the question for hours over the last few months, lying down before bed and staring at her ceiling until she fell asleep. Though she would never tell a soul, her browser history was littered with links about universities in the Tokyo prefecture, especially ones close to home that offered programs in music.

“Isn’t it too early to think about university?” Kasumi wondered out loud, but Arisa shook her head. The National Center Test in January, just four months away, hailed a period of time for high-school seniors affectionately called exam hell. Anyone who wanted to attend a college or university needed to do well on that test and all the other exams following it. After that, graduation was no further than a hop and a skip—a jump wasn’t even necessary. And who knew what each of them would be doing after that?

Kasumi put her hands behind her. “University,” she repeated slowly, tilting her head back until Arisa was looking at the tips of her star-shaped buns. “That word has such a smart feeling to it. It gives me such a... such a...”

“A heart-pounding feeling?”

“No, a sparkling feeling!”

“That’s what I... Wait, there’s a difference? Really?”

Kasumi twisted around and smiled at her, neither confirming nor denying the point. Arisa eyed her with as much skepticism as she could muster.

As random as their conversations could get, they gave Arisa a sense of comfort that she didn’t get when she talked with other people. Kasumi never tried to make a pretense of herself, which already set the two of them apart as far as personality went. Not only that, but she talked openly in spite of the fact that Arisa rarely disclosed anything about herself. It would be an injustice to say that she didn’t put in the effort to be friends despite their differences.

“So do you have any idea on what you want to do next?” Arisa moved the conversation back to the topic, hoping that Kasumi would have thought of something after hearing her share first. She was ready to adjust her own plans if necessary, or even throw them out the window if need be.

“University sounds like fun,” Kasumi replied after some time. “We could take the same classes, and hang out all the time, and we can study music together! But,” she paused and smiled wider, “no matter what, I’ll be happy as long as I can keep making music with Poppin’Party!”

“There you go again,” Arisa muttered. She felt her face heat up even though the words weren’t meant for her alone. “I swear, you get sappier over time.”

“But it sounds like we’ll have to do a lot of studying,” finished Kasumi in a sadder tone. Her eyelids drooped the way they always did when she was worried about something.

“It’s not too bad, actually. The hard part is getting in, but I’ve heard that university classes are easier than high school ones. There are also junior colleges, which should be even less stressful, and it only takes two or three years to graduate at one of those.”

“Ooh! I could do that, yeah! As long as I don’t have to study all day, so I can play guitar.”

“We would all have to stay relatively close to each other either way,” Arisa continued. “The more spread out we are, the more difficult it’ll be to meet up, if you want to continue doing band stuff.”

And if even one of them was too far for meeting up to be convenient, then... Arisa swallowed and banished the thought. Memories from two years ago surfaced, of their band before they were official. What had happened to Saya with her old band, she wanted to avoid no matter the cost.

“That’s tough... What can we do about that?” Kasumi trailed away and cast her eyes upward. “Do you know all the universities around here, Arisa? We should make a list.”

“I mean, just the obvious ones...” She listed some of the schools she had found within their area. “Some of them are farther away than others. There’s a lot in Shinjuku, but I could only find one in Kita, where you live. Toshima has a college specifically for music, and Bunkyo has Tokyo University. But competing for Tokyo Uni is crazy if we’re all trying to get into the same school...”

“Whoa, that’s it! Arisa!” Kasumi sat straight up. “Let’s all go to college together! If we all go to the same school again, that way we can stay together!”

Arisa nodded and said, “That’s exactly what I meant.”

Kasumi beamed at her. “Promise?” Her pinky finger extended, she held out her hand. Arisa looked at it, then met her eyes, and her dumbfounded expression morphed into a half smile.

“Promise.”

She wrapped her own little finger around Kasumi’s. But reality caught up to her soon after that. “But don’t forget, you have to ask the others what they want too.”

Kasumi wound back as if she had just remembered. Arisa explained, “Saya, Rimi, and O-Tae might have their own agendas. You have to consider that too.”

“Good point. Wait, what about you Arisa?”

“Oh.” She realized with an internal whoops that she had neglected to mention herself. “I already told you. I’m not set on anything else. If we can make it happen, I’d be okay with, well... following the band wherever it goes.”

Arisa liked the smile Kasumi made then, but she didn’t notice her teary eyes until too late. “Hold on—” She barely had a chance to speak before a warm body landed on top of her, and the impact made her grunt.

Flailing like someone who didn’t know how to tread water, she tried unsuccessfully to push Kasumi away for a good five seconds until Kasumi finally let her go and sat up. They locked eyes.

“You annoyance,” Arisa said and finally relented with a sigh and a shake of her head. Kasumi only chuckled. “Anyway. What were you saying about the band?”

“Um... Was I saying something?” Kasumi scratched her cheek, and Arisa held her breath. “Oh, I got it!” she exclaimed, ultimately falling for the bait. Arisa allowed herself a small smirk. “Everyone likes being a part of Poppin’Party, right?”

Arisa thought it a rhetorical question at first, so she was taken aback when Kasumi seemed to be waiting for her to say something. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? We wouldn’t be playing together and putting on shows after all this time if we didn’t enjoy it.”

“Yeah, see?” The image of optimism, Kasumi pumped her fists. “Everything’s gonna work out! I’m sure of it! I’ll ask everybody what they think the next time we have a band meeting.”

“You mean tomorrow,” Arisa reminded her.

“Yes!” Kasumi shouted in English, something Arisa had learned to be wary of. English meant excitement, sometimes dangerous levels of it.

“Make sure you think about what you’re saying, okay? Try not to go in sounding like you’ve already decided what you want for all of us.”

“Yes!!”

While they had been talking for the past half hour, a cloud crawled across the sky and covered up the sun. It moved away now, and sunlight fell across the lawn once more in a summery encore, before evening could scatter it in every direction.

Arisa stood up with a hup. Lying prone for so long had ruined her sense of balance, so she swayed for a second until she regained her footing.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, nodding toward the inside of the house. “I’m going to get something to snack on.”

“Oh, yes please! I want something to eat.”

“What do you want?”

“How about... matcha?” Arisa stopped mid-step and gave Kasumi a withering look.

“Matcha is a drink, you moron. But sure, I’ll go make some.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What will be left when it's all over?  
> Where have my days of youth gone?  
> On these kinds of nights, your voice—  
> I want to hear it."

Poppin’Party’s basement haunt was a cozy mess strewn with knick-knacks and miscellanies, most of which were just the band members’ personal effects brought and left overnight and never taken home thereafter. One of Saya’s old mugs stamped with the Yamabuki Bakery logo held so many mechanical pencils that Kasumi couldn’t tell which ones had originally been hers. It sat on top of an old issue of Bonsai Monthly that had been there for as long as she could remember. There were sushi rolls all over the table too. Not real sushi though; they were just flash drives Rimi used to share the scores she wrote for their music.

Posters of various bands and concerts covered the walls, half of them Poppin’Party’s. Their music equipment took up a whole half of the room. Whenever she stood in the middle of the room like she did now, surrounded by all the makings of their band, her heart always seemed to beat with a little more excitement.

Her friends watched her as they passed and got comfortable. She looked around and took a deep breath. It smelled a little like instrument polish, a little like furniture, but above everything she picked up the faint scent of matcha. Her mood suddenly heightened, she started to chant, “Po-pi-pa...”

She saw Arisa look up from her phone. “What are you—”

“Pi-po-pa!” Tae chimed in with the second phrase.

“Wait, Kasumi—”

“Po-pi-pa-pa-pi-po—” Tae, Rimi, and Saya all chanted with her until the very last syllable, at which she diverged from the formula and shouted, “Planning!”

Tae lowered her fist. “Huh? It’s not how I remember it.”

“Yup!” Kasumi placed her hands on her hips. In her right hand, she held the spiral-bound notebook she used to illustrate her ideas. “I’ve got something super important to say today, so for today our cheer is ‘popipa pipopa popipapapipo-planning!’”

“It’s even more of a mouthful than usual,” commented Saya. She laughed after she said it.

“Plannin’Party,” Tae said. “Oh... We do a lot of in’-ing.”

Arisa muttered something under her breath before speaking up. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but can you go back to what you were saying, Kasumi?”

“Yes!”

While she thumbed through the pages of her notepad, the hint of matcha in the air tickled her senses. It was nice; green tea was bitter, but what she smelled right now was much more pleasant though incredibly faint. She held her breath, trying to get another whiff. It was weird that such a small, inconsequential thing stood out to her at a time like this. Dazed, she returned her attention to her fingers and realized she had flipped past the page she was looking for. She went back and found it.

“’Kay, so,” she declared, reining herself in. “We’re all third years now—yaaay!—so that means we all get to graduate in March! Hooray!” A smattering of applause from her audience. “That’s, uh... six months from now?”

“Seven,” Saya corrected her. “Graduation happens at the end of March.”

“Thank you, Sa~aya!” she said in her best English. “And so, as a band, we need to talk about what happens next. We won’t be in high school anymore, so a lot of things are gonna change.”

She pointed at Arisa, who was sitting on the closest sofa with her legs crossed and her arm resting on the back of the seat. “Arisa’s going to university! She’s super smart, so she’ll definitely get in.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Arisa thanked her with a roll of her eyes, “but it’s not exactly a surefire thing. You realize it depends almost entirely on how you do on the tests, right?”

“Yeah, but you always do good on tests!”

Saya tapped her cheek with one finger, which usually meant she was in a good mood. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be trying to get into university Arisa,” she said with a scant smile. “Don’t you find school boring?”

“Well, yeah, but you know.” She deflected Saya’s questioning with a wave of her hand. “I’d feel lazy if I stayed home all the time. Don’t you get that feeling too, Rimi?”

“Ah, I get that too,” Kasumi added as everyone turned to look at Rimi, who jumped as if she hadn’t expected to be called on.

“I... do, sometimes.”

“So what about you, Rimi-rin?” Kasumi took advantage of the flow of the conversation to ask about her. “What are you doing after high shcool?”

“High shcool,” Tae repeated with a straight face. Arisa snorted then swiftly covered her mouth with a hand.

While that went on, Rimi pursed her lips and looked off to the side. She seemed to take a longer time than usual to come up with an answer, so she probably hadn’t thought very much about it yet. Kasumi had been there just yesterday, so she understood where she was coming from.

“Is high shcool really that funny?” Tae wondered out loud.

Arisa took a deep breath and went on in a taut voice. “Not really, it just sounds kinda shilly.” It took a second for her mistake to sink in. “Silly! I meant silly!”

Tae smiled. “Haha.”

“Aaagh!”

Everyone laughed, except for Arisa, who clutched her head and reeled. When the laughter finally ended, about ten more seconds passed until Rimi noticed everyone was watching her. Her face turned as pink as her clothes, and she apologized.

“I haven’t thought of anything yet,” she admitted quietly.

“No problem.” Kasumi assured her and did her best to help her come up with something. “But do you have anything you want to do? What do you think of going to university with Arisa?”

“Eh? You shouldn’t just push it on her like that...” But Rimi just smiled in Arisa’s direction, who let up on her scolding.

“It’s okay, Kasumi-chan isn’t pressuring me. My parents would be really happy if I went to a good school.”

To the left of Rimi, Saya caught Kasumi’s eye and seemed to sense it was her turn to share. “Japan has a lot of good universities. I was thinking about attending one too.”

“You aren’t taking over the bakery?” Tae asked. She didn’t sound as if she were joking, but Kasumi knew her well enough to tell she was. Probably. “Why would you go to a university when you own a buniversity?”

Arisa immediately covered her mouth. This time she succeeded in not laughing, and she met Kasumi’s grin with a glare.

Saya laughed. “No, I’m not. And I don’t own the business yet. My dad actually said that even if I wanted to work full-time at the bakery, he would turn me away. Not for a few years, he told me. Both he and my mom said they wanted me to do something with my life besides sell bread.”

“That sounds like something your parents would do,” Rimi remarked with a smile. “They’re always looking out for you, huh?”

“Yup. So yeah, I think I’m going to school for a few more years. But I would prefer to stay close by so that I can live at home, which will save a lot of money too.”

Finally, Kasumi turned to Tae. Before she could even ask, Tae announced, “I want to go to a good university so I can study music.” Her voice was firm, just like the time she had told them her desire to represent CiRCLE at Rockin’ Star Fes.

Saya nodded, unsurprised by the shift in Tae’s demeanor. “Like the one in Toshima?”

At a rare level of sobriety, Tae nodded and went on. “Or in Chofu. But I want to go to a high-ranked school no matter what.”

“Wow...” Kasumi stared at her in awe. Tae’s drive, when it showed, always impressed her. “Why do you wanna go to a high-ranked school so much?” she asked.

Tae tilted her head as if she had just been asked why she kept a bunch of pet rabbits—because she liked rabbits, duh. “Well, the higher ranking a school has, the better it is at being a school. Better professors, I think? Oh, and since it’s better, everyone is more motivated, so there’s a better environment. And it’s prestigious, so when I come back with my degree, Poppin’Party will be more famous.”

At that, Arisa rolled her eyes. “You just made that up right now,” she said.

“And the food is probably better too. And the hallways would be wider than at a bad school, so it’d be more comfortable—”

“Okay, okay, we get it!”

So Arisa was going to university, as well as Rimirin, Saya, and Tae. All of a sudden, junior college didn’t seem like much of an option, even if it did sound a lot easier and a lot less difficult to get into. Now that she had confirmed all her friends were all doing the same thing, she wanted to follow them instead. No way was she going to be left out just because she took the easier route.

Saya said her name. Kasumi blinked and moved her head. An expectant smile was on Saya’s lips. Neither of them said anything for a few seconds—she thought Saya was going to go—so she looked around and realized with a start Rimi, Arisa, and Tae were also watching her.

Her eyes widened. Arisa sighed and said, “You’re the only one who hasn’t shared yet.”

“Oh!” With an embarrassed laugh, she told them she was going to university too. “I want us to stay together!” she said, looking from left to right and making eye contact with all four of them. “So we should all go to the same university!”

Her suggestion came as a surprise, apparently. Saya sat up a little straighter, and Rimi made a thoughtful noise. Tae’s mouth formed a circle, but otherwise she seemed to approve of the idea.

Arisa had known what she was going to say beforehand, so she didn’t even blink. Rather, she just said, down to earth as always, “That’ll be hard, you know? Things don’t always work out. What are you going to do when we don’t get into the same school?”

“That’s why we apply to every school possible!” she declared. Everyone’s eyebrows went up at first, but eventually they all seemed to consider the idea and approve of it.

“It’s worth a try,” Saya said, smiling. Tae crossed her arms and bobbed her head in approval.

Rimi asked, “What schools would we apply to?”

“It has to be somewhere close, for Saya!” Kasumi stated, pointing at said person. Then she pointed at Tae. “And it has to be a good school, for O-Tae!”

Arisa stood up and motioned up the stairs. “I’m going to go get my laptop. We’ll figure out a list of the schools we’re going to apply to together.”

“Thanks, Arisa,” Saya said, giving her a wide smile. Arisa didn’t even look, but she flipped her hair over her shoulders and made some sounds that meant something along the lines of you’re welcome. Kasumi also smiled while she passed, though Arisa didn’t react to her either.

As Arisa’s head, arms, legs, and shoes disappeared above the hatch door, Kasumi’s breath caught. She closed her eyes, wrinkled her nose, and sniffed the air carefully. There it was again, that sweet scent.

“Do you guys smell matcha?” she asked, turning to Saya, who cocked her head, and Tae, who shrugged. Rimi’s eyes opened wide, and she nodded.

“So it’s not just my imagination?” she asked, sounding relieved.

“No, it’s me too. I don’t know why, but I’ve just been in the mood for matcha recently.” She paused. The smell was making her hungry. Or thirsty, because matcha was a drink, as Arisa had told her.

“Hey,” she said to them, “Do you think Arisa will make me some if I ask? Should I ask? Actually, let’s all just go ask her!” She got up and trotted over to her shoes, calling up the stairs. “Arisa, wait up! Let’s all make smoothies!”

Tae rose to her feet. “I could go for smoothies,” she said, following Kasumi up the stairs. Saya and Rimi shared a look, shrugged, and stood up too.

“That’s our leader,” Saya said, a mischief in her eyes. “Leading one moment, running off the next. You know, you and Kasumi are probably just smelling Arisa’s new soap. She told me she had bought a matcha-scented one the other day.”

“So that’s what it is.” Rimi laughed. The two of them heard Arisa’s and Kasumi’s voices in distant conversation. “I have a feeling we’re getting smoothies today. Arisa is really kind to us, isn’t she?”

“Yup,” Saya said. “And you know how she rarely says no about these sorts of things anyway.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "All of it,  
> With no illusions,  
> Is coming to an end,  
> Even the things I know;  
> Ah—this world is—  
> Lovingly gentle;  
> It almost makes me want to cry  
> With how bright it is!"

January arrived like jetsam on a beach, washing up one day and bringing with it a sense of tense finality. Exam hell was about to start and, like it or not, the senior class had entered full cram mode.

Gazing out across a miniature city of textbook skyscrapers and notebook roads, Kasumi felt her eyes glaze over. A few seconds later, Arisa’s eraser bounced off her ear.

“Kasumi,” she chided, cold and disapproving. “We’re not done yet. Don’t zone out.”

“But Arisa...” she moaned, slumping over. “We’ve been studying for three hours.”

Laying her cheek against the table made her feel better, but only for a moment. Now, if she could just close her eyes for a little while...

 _Clunk._ Someone set something down by her face. She opened her eyes, and a bright orange can of juice, glistening with condensation, appeared right in front of her.

“Take a short break, Kasumi.” Saya gave her an angelic smile as she settled into a cushion adjacent to Kasumi’s side of the table. “You won’t remember anything you study if you aren’t focused.”

“Thanks, Saya.” Laboriously, she lifted her head and grabbed the can before staggering to her feet. Every now and then her eyelids twitched, desperately wanting to close for a few minutes that she knew, if she were left undisturbed, would turn into a few hours.

But napping was hardly an option since she had so much material left to cover before she caught up to Arisa and the others. During their study sessions, they moved through book lessons at such a blinding pace that she had to review almost everything again at home, or else she felt like she would forget otherwise.

Not too many weeks remained before the start of testing, so there was no alternative other than fall behind. Stressful times.

She just wanted to play the guitar. But Arisa had told her to leave it at home, because otherwise it would call to her, and then there would be no way she could resist the temptation of playing instead of sitting still and reading for hours on end.

Tae and Rimi had glued themselves to their books with more concentration than she could possibly manage. At least, Rimi had; on closer inspection, Tae’s pupils weren’t moving. If not for her eyelids moving every now and then, her eyes could have been painted on.

“Hey!” Arisa, having noticed Tae as well, flicked another eraser. How many did she even have? “Are you awake, O-Tae?”

“Huh? Oh. No, I don’t think I am.”

“Oh _god_.”

Tae screwed her eyes shut and sat up so straight that Kasumi could hear a minor shockwave coming from her back. She slapped her cheeks a few times and then kneaded them a bit, making silly faces.

That morning, approximately eight hours ago, Poppin’Party had met up for a Poppin’Study Sesh. All of them were using their own time to study as well, but since they would all be taking the same tests, they could study together and mix things up a bit. Kasumi found it a little easier to breathe when her friends were sitting around the same table, but it didn’t help that the notes they were studying weren’t the musical kind. She hadn’t touched her guitar in a week; it was sitting at home in its case, lonely without her, and her without it.

Kasumi sighed, put her drink down, and walked over to Arisa, who appeared quite relaxed flipping through a workbook on the sofa, knees folded under her. Collapsing into a pile on the ground in front of her, she planted her face in the cushion with a worn-out sigh. “Arishaaa,” she mumbled into the pillows. “I’m sho gonna fail...”

“There’s no way you can fail,” Arisa reassured her. “It’s a placement test. You’ll just do horribly.”

“That’s what I mean...”

Arisa put her book aside and leaned over until she could push Kasumi upright. “Just keep working. Complaining won’t help you pass.” She unfolded her legs to get off the sofa, but before she could stand up, Kasumi sighed and plunked her head down again. She heard Arisa click her tongue before receiving a knifehand to the head, not forceful enough to hurt. “You want to get into university, right?”

While Arisa tried to get her to sit up again—halfheartedly, Kasumi noticed with relief—Saya and Rimi started discussing what they were wanted to have for dinner, since the five of them were planning to study until dusk set in. Tae was quick to add that she wanted ramen.

Arisa listened and commented every so often. Since it was pretty much decided they would be going out or getting takeout, her grandmother didn’t have to cook today, so she looked a bit happy about that. What passed as a good mood for Arisa was much more subtle than it was for Kasumi. Though she stayed the same calm, put-together person, it was the way she relaxed that gave it away: more smiles, sometimes even a little bit of laughter, though she could just as easily snap back to her usual self if she felt too loose.

Arisa’s hand stopped trying to shove Kasumi off the seat and instead fiddled with her hair, not that Kasumi minded as long as she could take a break. A handful of minutes later, she did urge Kasumi to get up again, and Kasumi complied for her own good.

When she reached the end of the chapter and marked down an answer in her booklet to the last question in the section, she tossed her pencil down, exhaled, and deflated onto the sofa. Everyone else had already wrapped up as well, though Rimi was still finishing up.

“Everybody,” she began. Rimi jumped as if she had worked herself into a trance. Kasumi grinned at her and then everyone else. “We’re so close! I can feel it. We’re all going to university, together! We’re gonna go to school together, and we’ll be able to take the same classes and sit together at lunch, and hang out after school!”

“We already do that,” Arisa reminded her, though not without a hint of an empathetic smile.

Kasumi’s enthusiasm spread to Saya, who picked up where Kasumi had left off. “University will be a lot of fun, huh? Even when I’m at home, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. University students just have so much more freedom compared to high-school students.”

“Yeah,” Arisa followed up, “more freedom and more things to be responsible of. But you’re going to be living at home, right Saya? You won’t have to worry about that.”

Saya nodded. “Are you staying at home too?”

Arisa shook her head. “I could definitely stay with my grandmother, but we both agreed that it’s a good chance for me to live on my own. It’ll be a bit more expensive, but you’ve gotta start at some point.”

Everyone nodded to that.

“I really hope I get into the music college in Toshima,” Tae said. “It’s close to home, but I think I want to try living in a dorm if it’s affordable.”

“Do your best, O-Tae.” Saya made a motivational gesture with her fist. “Hopefully we can all go there together. That would be pretty amazing.”

“Saya, you wanna be roommates?”

“O-Tae... I told you I’m staying at home. I’ll definitely visit though.”

Tae hummed loudly and rubbed her chin. “I hope they serve good ramen. That’s important when you have to go to school for four years.”

“O-Tae...” Arisa glanced at her. “Are you hungry?” she asked, to which Tae’s eyes widened.

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

While Arisa rolled her eyes, Kasumi cleared her throat. “Okay. Arisa! You go next. What are you hoping for?”

“What. Me? Is that what we’re doing?” Arisa poked her lip. Lately, she had started doing that while she was thinking, and it was kind of cute—not that Arisa would ever appreciate being told so. “I guess I hope they offer interesting classes. Universities have a bigger variety of courses than high schools. Social sciences and things like that. I’ve heard psychology is getting more attention these days.”

“Arisa a psychologist?” Saya pretended to think, and she did a poor job of it. She put her hands on her hips and made a stern expression. “Oi! Quit worrying about your friends and tell them how you honestly feel already!”

“You’re terrible at impersonating me.” Saya’s antics earned her a disdainful look from Arisa, but that didn’t stop her from giggling. “I don’t talk like that, you know.”

While Arisa did her best to scold Saya and defend her reputation, Tae turned to Kasumi. She looked as if she had been thinking about something ever since Arisa started talking. “I also hope I can take private classes,” she said. “Not just eat the food, even though that’s important to me too.”

“Ooh!” Kasumi gasped, wheels turning in her head. “Like with a private instructor?”

“Yeah. You can pay for that at a good university.”

“Wow!” For a short while, the idea took her back in time, to memories of learning chords on the guitar in a sunlit classroom on the second floor—noons spent pulling at strings until she learned to pluck and strum properly. “I want to do that too! Private guitar lessons sounds awesome.”

“Let’s take them together,” Tae suggested. “We both play guitar, so it works out.”

Arisa interjected then. “But that literally isn’t how it works?” she said, her voice begging them to understand. “It’s a private instructor. Pri-vate,” she emphasized by clapping her hands. “As in, one on one.”

“You don’t know that,” Tae stated as if it were a matter of fact.

“Ugh, you. Well, it’s true I don’t really know their policy, but still.”

Tae went on. “We can make a special request. Me and Kasumi will be a duo that does street performances, and we only ever play with each other. Or we can say we’re girlfriends.”

“That’s called lying,” Arisa shot back.

A staring contest started between the two of them, though it was mostly Arisa trying to sway Tae with her glare. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.

Best to let them duke it out, Kasumi figured as she looked for the next person to call on. She caught Saya’s eye, and as usual Saya caught the ball.

“I hope they have good food too,” Saya said, throwing her lot in with Tae, “but I would actually really like to take a business class. That kind of thing is important in the real world when it comes down to jobs and making money, but for some reason it’s not something they really teach in high school.”

“Oh! So true,” Kasumi agreed. “That’s Saya for you, always a step ahead.”

Saya laughed, shook her head. “I wouldn’t say that. You’re all doing just as much if not more. Rather... it’s more like we’re standing shoulder to shoulder but staying on our own paths, if that makes any sense.”

Kasumi nodded slowly. “All standing together, moving forward together... Wait a second!” She sat up straight and grinned. “Those are the lyrics to our song! You know, the one we sang when we auditioned for SPACE. ‘ _Ta-to-e..._ ’”

She started singing the beginning to their song in a soft voice and looked around, hoping it would catch on. Saya and Tae bobbed their heads, but it didn’t, unfortunately. “What, nobody wants to sing with me? We should at least sing if we can’t play.”

Surprise karaoke just wasn’t going to happen today, she accepted with a theatrical sigh. That came as no surprise; they were in the middle of testing season, after all.

She put her hands behind her and leaned back, rubbing pink carpet tufts between her fingers. After talking about university and all that could happen when they got there, she felt a lot more like herself again. All this studying, day in and day out, had been like someone throwing a net over her and trying to drag her down. Being able to stand up and breathe again felt so good.

She looked over at Rimi, who was so focused that dust could have settled on her line of sight like water on a wire. “Rimi-rin!”

A jolt seized Rimi’s shoulders. “Uh? Yeah, what’s up?”

“Oh! You reverted to your Kansai dialect again. It’s still cute every time I hear it!” Rimi turned as pink as her soul and swept the floor with her eyes, a nervous habit of hers. It suddenly hit Kasumi why Rimi looked so out of it.

“It’s all this studying, huh?” she said with a glance at the table covered in textbooks. Rimi nodded and rubbed her eyes, looking as tired as Kasumi felt.

“I’ve been staying up later than usual to read,” Rimi explained. Maybe because of her slip earlier, she enunciated each word with more care than usual. “I’m a little worried about not getting into any schools...”

“You’ll get in, I’m sure of it!” No hesitation, Kasumi told her what she thought, giving her a thumbs up for good measure. Rimi was smarter than she took herself for. If she was taking extra time to study, well, Kasumi needed to take extra extra time. She frowned at the table again. “Anyway, what are you hoping for, when we go to university together?”

Rimi listened to the question and went quiet. So much nervousness concentrated on her face while she thought that Kasumi was about to tell her she didn’t have to answer the question when finally, her lips parted. “We’ll still be close to home, so I can go to Saya-chan’s bakery every day, but... good food, I guess?”

Tae smiled, Saya snickered, and Arisa let out such a groan that someone might have surmised she had lost a bet. Kasumi scooted closer and placed a hand on Rimi’s shoulder. “You’re not the only one, Rimi-rin.”

“What about you, Kasumi-chan?” asked Rimi. “What do you hope for?”

“Besides private classes,” Arisa added, quick to cut off her escape.

“Me?” Kasumi reclined and craned her head up so she could see the ceiling. Arisa’s basement had a set of four track lights that were all at weird angles, but they somehow made sure the whole room was lit up.

Weirdly enough, she hadn’t thought about whether there was something she wanted. When she had asked everyone else, she had just been trying to start a conversation. And at the moment, she couldn’t really think of one either. “I guess my hope,” she began, dithered for a little bit longer, then finished, “is that you guys get everything you hope for!”

Arisa threw a pillow at her, and it hit her square in the side of the face. “That’s such a copout!”

“Yeah,” Tae added. “We know that already. Tell us the dream that belongs to Kasumi.”

“Each of us have shared something,” Saya said. “And you’ve listened to all of our personal goals and made them into Poppin’Party’s goals. Now we want you to tell us something, so that we can all be in it together.”

Kasumi looked from face to encouraging face as her bandmates took turns urging her on. Even Arisa, who normally lifted and eyebrow or narrowed her eyes, gave her a small smile.

“You guys...” Her arms started to tremble. Tears welled up in her eye, and she wiped them away. “I want to”—she got choked up but coughed it away and went on—“stay friends with everyone here, forever. No matter what happens, I want to talk about everything, and experience new things, and... and yeah!”

Filled with the urge to love and cherish her friends, Kasumi grabbed the first person close to her (“Rimi-riiin!”) and gave her a tight hug.

“Aren’t you embarrassing today,” Arisa noted. Over Rimi’s shoulder, Kasumi saw her cross her arms. After one more squeeze, she let go of Rimi and scooted closer to Arisa, who grimaced. “You don’t. Need to. Seriously, leave me alone Kas—aagh!”

In the end, everybody got a hug before Kasumi was satisfied. They packed up and got ready to go out for ramen, in adherence with Tae’s request, and for the rest of the night, the mood was good. They still had a lot of work to do, but thanks to her friends she had a renewed sense of motivation. Later tonight, she resolved as they waited for the crosswalk signal, she would get plenty of work done. She wanted to catch up to where Arisa was in the math textbook, but first she needed to finish up her English workbook, and then there was science...


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I cried in spring! I made a decision in summer!  
> From here on out—  
> It was hidden in autumn! I found out in winter!  
> Everything so far—"

Opening the door to Yamabuki Bakery tripped a small bell attached to the iron door frame. “Welcome,” the person behind the counter called out. “Oh, O-Tae.”

“Hi Saya,” Tae greeted her. “You’re working today?”

“Yeah. Dad is tired, so I’m taking over the morning and afternoon shifts.”

Trays and tongs for getting buns were stacked on a table near the entrance, but Tae didn’t take one. The bakery wasn’t very busy, and the only other customer was currently occupied by the window, filling their tray with bread. She hadn’t come to buy anything, although when Saya walked into the back room and came out with a fresh batch of steaming sausage buns, her taste buds got the better of her.

“Do you want one?” Saya asked, walking just close enough so that the smell wafted up to Tae’s nose.

“I didn’t plan on buying any bread today,” Tae told her, but she was fighting a losing battle against herself.

“Honestly, I’d let you have one for free since we aren’t very busy today.”

“Oh. Okay. Can I have two?”

“Hm... One and a half.” Saya winked at her. “Just kidding. You can have two, sure.”

While they were talking, Saya started moving the fresh buns inside a plastic display case, pushing older ones toward the back. As soon as she finished restocking, the other customer in the store moved in and put three on her tray.

“I’ll bag these for you,” Saya said to Tae, still carrying two buns sprinkled with white sesame seeds and twisted around herb-dotted sausages.

“Thanks Saya.” Following her to the counter, Tae waited while Saya reached under the table for a bag. “Free buns are nice.”

“I know, right?”

Saya put one into a small paper pouch decorated with Yamabuki Bakery’s store name. The other one, she handed directly to Tae.

“One for now and one to go,” she declared with a flawless service smile. “I hope they’re good.”

“They are,” Tae said. “Thanks Saya. You’re great.”

“So,” the great Saya said and propped her elbows up on the counter. “What brought you here, if it wasn’t bread?”

“I just wanted to say hi. I didn’t think you would be working at this time.”

Saya nodded. “Sorry it just so happened that the time you visit is the time I’m taking a double shift.”

Tae nodded back. “That’s fine. It just so happened, right?”

“Mhm. Thanks for always being so understanding.” Saya tipped her head to the back door, which led to part of Yamabuki Bakery that was more Yamabuki than bakery. “Did you want to hang out with Jun and Sana? They’re home right now, and if you play your guitar for them, they’ll love it.”

“Oh, that would be cool. But I shouldn’t stay for too long.”

“You sure? My family wouldn’t mind.” Saya grinned—something funny must have crossed her mind. “Or maybe you could have a street performance in front of the store, since you’ve got your guitar with you? Having Poppin’Party’s lead guitarist play for us would probably pull in a lot of customers.”

“Haha. I’ll do that another time. For now, I should get going.”

“Okay. Let’s hang out another time. Enjoy the buns.”

“Oh, that reminds me.” Tae held up her sausage bun, which she had yet to take a bite of. “Can I get another bag for this?”

As Saya reached under the counter for another bag, someone sidled up next to Tae. “‘Scuse me, coming through...” A tray holding a ton of buns—at least one of every kind available, probably—slid onto the countertop. Then another one. Tae couldn’t see any tray underneath all that bread.

“You lucked out today, huh?” commented the only other person who had been in the bakery since Tae had entered. “Two free buns. Right out of the oven, too. The only downside is they probably don’t count toward point cards, but a pretty good deal either way.”

“Hey Moca,” Tae greeted her. “I don’t have my point card anyway.” She took the bag that Saya gave her over the hill of buns Moca had brought to the register and thanked her again.

“No problem, O-Tae. See you around! Wow, you’re buying a lot today, Moca.”

“Of course, Saya-chin~ I’m stocking up for the weekend. Can I have them for free like O-Tae over here?”

“Haha, sorry. We’re still running a business. If we let our best customer make off with everything out on display, we’ll lose more than we can afford.”

“No fair. Can I at least get a few for free? I’m like Tae-chin in a lot of ways. I’m a lead guitarist for my band too, and I rock blue just as well as she does. Oh, I know. What if the great Moca-chan joins Poppin’Party...”

Tae listened until the door to the bakery closed behind her and blocked out their voices. Holding a bagged bun in each hand, she turned left from the bakery and left again, onto a straight road going up a short hill. Continuing up the street brought her into a residential district, and a few more turns brought her to a lane of two-story houses bordered in brick walls topped by metal fencing.

Rimi lived in a nice house on the street corner, in a bedroom on the second floor sheathed with curtains. Tae peeled back the front gate and knocked at the front door. Less than a half-minute later, she heard Rimi’s footsteps approaching, and the door opened inward.

“Hey Rimirin.” Tae smiled at her. She would have waved, but she remembered just in time her hands were occupied.

“Hi O-Tae-chan. How are you?” Rimi stepped back so Tae could step in.

“Good.”

A pair of rabbit-eared slippers waited for her under the shoe rack. She nudged them out using her foot, and at the same time she handed one of the buns to Rimi.

“Here. Saya gave me two.”

“Oh, thank you! What is it?” asked Rimi, already taking a peek inside the bag.

“A sausage bun,” she answered. Then it crossed her mind: “Could you call these sausage cornets?”

Rimi gave some very serious consideration the question before responding. “Not really. The shape is almost right, but it’s not enough like a cone to be called a cornet.”

“Oh... I see.”

Rimi led her up the stairs to her bedroom. Her mother and father waved and said hello from the dining room where they were watching a TV show together. Tae liked them; they were both very polite and undeniably friendly.

Rimi’s bedroom door gave a small creak as they entered. Books dominated all the desk space in her room. A couple of them were novels, but most looked like workbooks and textbooks for math and language arts.

“You’re studying hard, Rimi-rin,” Tae commented as she plopped herself down on the green bedsheets of the lower bunk. “I should really study more too.”

“I think you’ll get into the schools you really want to go to, O-Tae-chan. You shouldn’t worry too much.” Rimi gave her a confident smile, but Tae only hoped her intuition would hold. “I’m just really anxious. I keep wondering what will happen if I don’t do well on my exams.”

“That won’t happen. I believe in you, and so do Kasumi, Arisa, Saya, and your family too.” Tae reached for the zipper on her guitar case. “Do you mind if I play guitar while you study?”

“No, not at all!”

Electric blue and her favorite non-sentient thing in the world, her ESP Snapper fit neatly in her lap after she made herself comfortable on the bed. She plucked one of its strings, and it made a sad metallic twang. The only problem with electric guitars was that they weren’t too useful by themselves. She took out a device she had recently bought: a vibration speaker, smaller than a box of mints and shaped like a cylinder.

“Can I borrow a textbook you’re not using?”

Rimi handed her _A Geographic and Political Perspective of Global History_. Tae laid it on the bed, placed her speaker on the cover, and plugged the speaker into her guitar. A warm, full sound came through the sides of the speaker when she strummed the strings again.

“Hey, the textbook is useful,” she said and got Rimi to laugh.

So that she wouldn’t distract Rimi too much, the songs she chose to play were softer and slower than what she would have picked practicing at home. After a bit, she played the song Rimi had written for her sister’s birthday, and at the end of that she just played whatever she felt like playing. It ended up being such a laid-back improv session that when she hit the finishing note, she took her hands off the guitar and let the sound play out to the very end. The silence afterward was revitalizing.

Rimi looked up from her books for the first time in half an hour to get out of her chair and stretch a bit. “Hey Rimirin,” Tae said to her, watching her lean backward and wave her hands in the air. “I wanted to ask you something. What do you do if you’re being pulled in two directions?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like tug of war, but you have to choose a side.”

Twang, twang. She hit a few more notes while Rimi looked up at a framed family photo on her desk’s top shelf.

“If you have to choose, then you should choose the one that’s best for you, right?”

Tae nodded and asked, “How do I know which one is best?”

“I suppose you have to look at it logically or just go with your gut feeling. O-Tae-chan”—Rimi switched gears and looked straight at her—“is there a big decision you have to make soon?”

“Yeah.” Tae examined the photo too. It was of Rimi and Yuri, her older sister, standing at the foot of a tall building that had a red ring near the top. She recognized it as Kyoto Tower. “I don’t know what I should do. I’ve been thinking about it, but I haven’t been able to come up with an answer. Being part of Popipa taught me to talk to you guys when I need help, so I wanted to ask you about it.”

In their second year of high school, she hadn’t considered her friends’ opinions enough. That had started a lot of problems in their friendship. Without Kasumi there to bring her back from her worst moment, Poppin’Party probably would have broken up. Even just thinking about the anxiety she given her friends made her heart ache a bit.

Rimi spun her chair around and sat down facing Tae. The way she talked made Tae feel like she was visiting a counselor. “Can you tell me more about your problem? Maybe I can help you figure out how to decide.”

Tae began to put her guitar down, but her lap felt empty without it, so she held onto it so her hands had something familiar to touch while they talked.

“I already told everyone I wanted to go to a good music school, right?” Rimi nodded, and Tae continued. “That’s the truth. I want to learn from people who are really into music like I am, and like we are. But there’s something else too.

“I want to get out there. I like Japan, and I like Tokyo, but I want to see other places too. So I looked up a list of top music schools in Japan, and there are a whole bunch of great schools outside of Tokyo. Nagoya, and Shizuoka, and Osaka. Especially Osaka. The Kansai region is great, right?”

“Uh huh, it totally is!” Rimi replied in her Kansai dialect, following up with a playful laugh. They shared a smile.

“And that got me thinking. What if we all went to school in Nagoya? Or Osaka? Somewhere that isn’t Tokyo. All of us, as a band, just in a different place. You know what I mean?”

While Tae studied the underside of the top bunk, Rimi rubbed her neck and said nothing for a bit. Her putting so much effort into her replies made Tae thankful to have gone to her for advice. “I think I get it,” she said. “It would be cool if we went to different places together that are far away from home, right?”

“Exactly. So I was going to suggest it to everyone the next time we talked about graduation, which was yesterday.” She sat back with a sigh. “But then Saya said the most important thing to her was that she could stay close to home.”

Realization came over Rimi, and her eyes softened. Judging by her expression, she understood.

Tae let out a pensive hum. That Rimi was in this with her now was relieving. She hadn’t been brave enough to bring it up straight to Saya, so her visit to the bakery had culminated in no more than small talk. And within their band, Rimi was the second most reliable person next to Saya for getting good, level-headed advice.

“Even if I convince everyone else to come with me,” she carried onward, “then Saya would have to choose between staying with her family and following us. I don’t want to make her choose between her friends and her family.”

Tae took a long, slow breath and exhaled. “Putting her in that position isn’t right. I’m not gonna do that to her.”

Averting her gaze, she put her hands on the strings and played a few chords on her guitar. They didn’t have the energy she was used to, so she played them again, but there was no improvement. She looked up at Rimi, who matched her gaze as if she had been anticipating it.

“I think...” Rimi started speaking, hesitated, then collected herself and started again. “I think you’re really selfless, O-Tae-chan. You put a lot of thought into it by yourself, and Saya-chan would appreciate that you’re thinking so much about her, for her sake. But,” she stopped again, in full control this time. “I think you’re also looking at it in the wrong way.”

Tae knitted her brows. She must have looked confused, because Rimi started to explain.

“You know how Saya-chan always feels responsible for her friends, even for things that aren’t necessarily her fault, right?” Tae did. Anyone who knew Saya’s history with CHiSPA knew about that side of her. “Well, what would she think if you told her that you didn’t follow your own dream because of her, and she didn’t even know until afterward?”

“I... Oh.” Tae’s jaw went slack as Rimi’s bullet of logic lodged into her brain. “I didn’t think about that. You’re right.”

“Saya-chan would feel guilty for imposing on you if you put her before yourself like that without telling her. So you should still apply to all the schools you want to go to. You don’t have to go, but you should at least apply.”

While she was talking, Rimi swiveled back and forth in her chair. When she finished, it faced in the direction of the window. For a moment, her warm and encouraging smile faded, replaced by a troubled crook of her brow. “And it’s not the end of the world if Popipa...”

Tae cocked her head. Rimi had gone quiet and left the sentence unfinished, though she hardly needed to complete it to get the message across. Regardless, Tae pressed her: “If Popipa what?”

Rimi took a long time answering. Finally, she said, “If we can’t be together for university.” Her countenance grim, she pivoted back to face Tae.

Whatever was going through her mind didn’t seem like anything to smile about, but in that moment Rimi tried. Her smile wasn’t joyful, optimistic, but it wasn’t bitter either. More than anything, she smiled as if that was how she wanted to feel on the inside.

“O-Tae-chan, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier. I was afraid to say anything about it too, but I feel like I need to tell you.” Rimi sucked in a breath. Her face stayed neutral except for an uncommon glint of determination in her gaze. “I’m going overseas for university.”

Tae blinked.

“You mean...”

Rimi did not waver. “I won’t be staying in Japan.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The blue sand that feels like it's pouring down;  
> It's sparkling, and shining,  
> It's dazzling, it always will be—  
> It's heartrending...!"

**Kasumi**

WOOHOOO  
WERE DONE WITH TESTING!!1  


**Rimi**

(ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

**Kasumi**

**Tae**

you and i still have a few more exams though

**Kasumi**

oh yeah, bleck

**Arisa**

Oh right, you two said you were applying to those other schools...

**Tae**

they’re hard to get into but we’re seeing what happens

**Saya**

:) Are we still going out to celebrate?

**Kasumi**

yeah!

**Tae**

where’re we going

**Saya**

We're getting dinner, right?

**Kasumi**

let’s go to...... dananana...  
sushi!?

**Arisa**

Saya doesn’t like seafood you doof

**Saya**

Yeah... but we can go if you want. I’ll just get a bento box.

**Kasumi**

no we’ll go somewhere else for saya!  
what about... curry? or raining

**Tae**

raining?

**Kasumi**

~~autocorrect kskkjd~~  
I meant ramen  
we all like ramen, right

**Arisa**

I mean yeah, but we had ramen last week.  
okay saya’s been typing for a while now what's up

**Tae**

i want sukiyaki 

**Saya**

We should get something special to celebrate! How about something non-Japanese? We never—  
Oh.. sorry O-Tae, I didn’t mean to talk over you...

**Arisa**

It’s okay, Tae literally entered that in less than 2 seconds, you’re good

**Saya**

I could go for sukiyaki though!

**Kasumi**

im ok with that

**Arisa**

Yeah, same here

**Rimi**

mhm! Sukiyaki sounds good! ^^

**Arisa**

Okay so we're decided  
Are we meeting up right now or what?

**Kasumi**

you're the only one not here arisa

**Arisa**

What. Where are you then

**Kasumi**

outside by the sign

**Tae**

www

**Arisa**

www yourself O-Tae, I’ll be there in a minute

Arisa shoved her phone into her bag and ducked out of the hallway into the closest stairwell. Taking the steps two at a time, she hurried toward the front entrance of the school. Ever since the bell had released her from class, she had been waiting in front of her testing room thinking the others would come by and find her. How was she supposed to have known they were already outside at their usual rendezvous point?

Outside the building, Kasumi waved her down as she stepped out under the portico. The three figures standing around her took note of her approach as well. So she really was the only one who hadn’t gotten the memo.

“Arisa! Over here,” Kasumi called, even though it was completely unnecessary since Arisa was already on her way. “Where were you?”

“The restroom,” Arisa lied. She paused and leaned forward a bit, squinting at her friend’s skin. “Er... Kasumi, what happened to your face?”

Kasumi touched the red line going up her cheek and stopping above her cheekbone. Her mouth twisted into an abashed line. “I might have fallen asleep on my pencil after finishing my test.”

The timing perfect, she yawned right after explaining herself. Arisa’s eyebrow shot way up. “Have you been sleeping recently?”

“I’ve been... sleeping,” Kasumi said. Her slight hesitation didn’t go unobserved. Arisa’s eyebrow went as high as it would go.

Voice flat for deliberate effect, she pressed, “When have you been going to bed?”  


Kasumi had to think about that one. “Last night, I think... two?”

Both of Arisa’s eyes opened wide. From someone like Rinko, that answer wouldn’t have surprised her (though it would be no less alarming), but Kasumi? Kasumi fell asleep involuntarily by midnight on most days. She couldn’t stay awake in a room full of people unless excitement was keeping her awake.

“Geez,” was Arisa’s eloquent comment. “What were you doing, studying?”

Kasumi nodded a sad nod. Arisa scanned the others’ faces. Saya looked fine, Rimi as well, though Tae’s slightly expression—a smidgen more absent than usual—may have been a sign that she had sacrificed a bit of sleep as well. Arisa herself, she had the discipline to go to bed by midnight or a half-hour after midnight at the latest.

Sighing for the hours of sleep her friends had lost, she said, “At least we’re done with that now. You can stop cramming every waking hour.” As if she had been waiting for someone to put it into words, Kasumi’s shoulders relaxed and relief crossed her features. “Anyway, we have a few hours until dinner, so if you guys aren’t busy... We have some time to waste, so...”

She dithered around the point she was trying to make. It was a habit, but fortunately nobody commented on it. It was times like these that made her thankful they could understand each other so well and without words.

Speaking of understanding each other without words, Arisa noticed Kasumi figuratively sparkling in the corner of her eye. Whenever an idea came into that girl’s mind, Arisa thought with a shake of her head, it was so easy to tell.

“Hey, hey,” Kasumi beckoned in a conspiratorial tone. “How about we go get tickets to a live show? It’s been a while since we’ve gone just to watch, not perform.”

Her suggestion seemed to sit well with the others. Arisa bobbed her head and crossed her arms. “That’s one idea. Anyone else?”

“Arisaaa,” Kasumi complained, “you can’t just dismiss a good idea like that.”

“I’m not dismissing it, I’m just breaking things down.”

“That’s what I meant!”

After discussing for a bit, they agreed on a plan and set out for the station, chatting like good friends tended to do:

“Woohoo! Sukiyaki!”

Arisa slapped her on the arm. “Keep your voice down, Kasumi! People don’t want to hear you yelling about food.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The sky is blue and the clouds are white,  
> A gentle sandglass;  
> Even though I know I can't grab hold of it,  
> I still extended my hand."

"Okay. Let's do this in a—"

"Whoa! I got into Toho Gakuen!"

"Ah, me too."

"Woohoo! High five, Sa~aya."

“Nice! Good job on getting in, Kasumi."

"Dear god. Okay, whatever. Do as you like."

Following the last week of testing, Poppin’Party celebrated the end of the month as they would a successful concert: with snacks and a colorful assortment of soft drinks, all from the convenience store down the street from Arisa’s house. Lawson had such a wide variety of chips and sweets that Kasumi ended up grabbing a lot of things at random whenever she went, not all of them good enough to warrant repeat purchases. Arisa usually confiscated one of the many bags of crispy junk food before retreating to the couch and making herself comfortable.

Today’s snack—she scanned the shiny writing on the bag—looked like standard potato chips in fancy packaging. Colored honey gold and stamped with a novel-sounding flavor, it was clearly a marketing ploy intended to increase sales, not revolutionize the chip world. She tore it open and crunched into a few while her friends took stock of the remaining snacks.

As Kasumi poured some melon soda into her tumbler, Tae asked, “Has anyone gotten an email from Tokyo yet?”

Arisa cleaned her fingers with a napkin and reached for her phone. "They sent me one yesterday,” she said, unable to stop an ounce of pride from slipping into her words. “I got in."

Her friends cheered and, following Tae’s lead, broke out in applause, so she allowed herself to feel on top of the world for a bit. University of Tokyo’s acceptance letter sat at the top of her inbox, and it gave her a spark of satisfaction every time she saw it. Qualification for one of the most contested universities in the country was no small achievement.

But to her, it amounted to little more than bragging rights. Unless by some miracle the rest of Poppin’Party had been accepted as well, the chance she would attend without them was almost zero.

When Arisa asked if anyone else had gotten in, her question was met with a telling silence. Saya took a sip from her cup, eyes pointed in her direction. “I’m not surprised you got in though,” she said after it was clear nobody else had received an acceptance letter. “You’re an amazing student, after all. When it comes to scoring well on tests, it’s like all you need to do is get your head in the game and the rest of us don’t stand a chance.”

“Why thank you, Saya.” She reveled in the praise and in the slight look of envy she received from Kasumi. “Well, it’s whatever. I wasn’t planning to go anyway.”

The corners of Saya’s mouth curled upward. “Only you would get accepted to one of the best schools in Japan and choose not to attend, huh Arisa?” She left too much unsaid for Arisa’s liking.

“You know fully well that I don’t care about prestige and which school is better and all that. Anyway,” she recouped in her firmest voice, “I need everyone’s cooperation so we can get a look at the big picture now.”

Having come prepared for the occasion, she slid off the couch onto the carpet in front of the table and grabbed a piece of paper and something to write with. She made a list of all the schools they had applied to as a group. Quite a few were relatively close to home, but there were also two that Tae and Kasumi had applied to on their own; she included those on the side.

“Alright. Raise your hand if you got into Toho Gakuen.”

Kasumi and Saya raised their hands. Arisa wrote their names down then added her own onto the end.

She went down the list, calling out schools and marking names as she went. At the end, she sat back and studied the paper for a few minutes. The others seemed to sense that she wanted to be left alone and got up to their own devices. There was one exception. Kasumi sidled up to her, curious about the paper as well. Arisa wouldn’t have minded if not for one thing.

“Hm...” Kasumi’s stare was more intense than Arisa had seen her look in a long while. The fixated look she had in her eye now had been there when they had been studying for their exams, but at present she seemed completely shut out from the world around her. “Mm... Hm.”

Her grumbling was so loud that it was distracting, but she didn’t even seem aware of the fact. Arisa had to clear her throat twice to get her attention, at which Kasumi gave a guilty start.

“Give me some space, will you?” Arisa told her off in a flat voice.

“Oops! Sorry.” Kasumi nodded and backed away, so much like a scolded puppy that Arisa felt a bit of remorse when she should have felt none. As she looked over the list one more time, her friends chatted with each other in low voices.

“Okay,” she declared. “Things didn’t work out as well as they could have, but we do at least have some options. Anyone want to take a look?”

They reconvened. Saya held her hand out, and Arisa passed her the sheet of paper. Her eyes darted down the list then back up to the top. Kasumi left Arisa’s side and hovered over Saya’s shoulder, following the paper as if she couldn’t afford to be away from it for too long. Arisa would have considered it strange for Kasumi to be so nervous, but the memory of what they had said to each other a few months ago came back to her.

“ _Promise?”  
“Promise.”_

They had sworn to go to college together—pinky sworn, but sworn regardless. It was no wonder Kasumi looked so worried.

In the meantime, Arisa rotated her pencil slowly around her fingers. Thanks to her aptitude for taking tests, and by a stroke of luck, she hadn’t been rejected from a single school she applied to. That was something to be proud of, but her joy was short-lived as from there, things got more complicated. Not one school had happened to accept all five of them. They had been close, very very close, but no dice.

Touching the tip of her pencil to the table, she drew directly on the wood, so lightly that she could erase it all with a swipe of her finger. There were a bunch of schools they had applied to, but these three were the closest:

The University of Tokyo, located in Bunkyo. Only she had gotten in, so she didn’t even consider it one of their main choices. The oldest of Japan’s “National Seven” universities, it stood as one of the most competitive in the country. Yeah, she thought as she wiped it away, not happening.

Tokyo’s College of Music, in Toshima. Herself, Saya, Tae, and Rimi. It wasn’t an easy school to get into by any means, so Arisa couldn’t bring herself to fault Kasumi for not testing in. And getting mad over it would be pointless. It surprised her already that four of them had been accepted. But everything would have been far more convenient if the five of them had all been able to attend.

Lastly, the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Chofu. Herself, Saya, and Kasumi this time. Not as renowned as the other schools on their list, it had a lower cutoff than the rest. Tae and Rimi should have gotten in, but they must have done poorly on the corresponding test; that was simply a reality of the entire entrance exam process. Tests had never been a perfect measure of how smart someone was. Someone could do fine on one test and underperform on another easier one right after, and that was likely what had happened to Tae and Rimi.

Aside from local options, Kasumi and Tae had also applied to two schools outside of Tokyo, one in Nagoya and the other in Shizuoka. As a result they had needed to take two more entrance exams, possibly explaining Kasumi’s lack of sleep as of late. Tae had somehow landed a spot in both schools, which was nothing short of amazing, and Kasumi had been accepted to the school in Shizuoka. Both were far from Tokyo—a minimum of an hour away by train, but Tae had told everyone she applied mainly because she wanted to see if she would get in, so it hardly mattered. There had been no reason for Kasumi to put herself through the extra trouble, but maybe she had volunteered to do it so that Tae wouldn’t be the only one.

So their options, if they wanted to go to college at all this year, all required splitting up. Because they were five and their options were limited, it would be an odd split no matter what.

Arisa pressed her pencil into the table with a tad too much force, and the lead snapped off. As she swept the tiny stick of graphite off the table, her hand smudged the groups of letters she had drawn, rendering them blurry and almost impossible to read.

“O-Tae, how did you...” she started to ask then stopped upon seeing her friend’s face. With her eyes closed, chin down, and half-emptied cup in frozen hand, Tae made for the perfect image of someone who had just dozed off. “O-Tae?”

Tae didn’t move. But without missing a beat, her mouth opened for just enough time to say, “Yes?”

Arisa’s impulse was to call Tae out for pretending to be asleep, but she restrained the impulse and got on with it: “How did you manage to get into both Nagoya and Shizuoka, but not the school in Chofu?”

A moment passed before Tae answered. “I dunno,” she said. Arisa bit back another affronted comment. “I didn’t expect it. I fell asleep on one of them.”

Arisa leaned forward and squinted. The area around Tae’s eyes seemed more wrinkled than usual, and the skin above her cheekbones did appear to sag a bit. “Have you been sleeping?”

“Yeah. But I just got sleepy halfway through my test, and on the others I got kind of hungry.” She stopped then, and following a pause her eyes opened and sought out Arisa. Melancholy seemed to creep into her features, and all of a sudden she apologized. “Sorry. I ended up making things harder, didn’t I?”

Taken aback, Arisa glanced around at the other three members watching the exchange and turned back to Tae. She shook her head. “No,” she stammered. “It’s fine. We’ll figure this out.”

While Arisa had been considering their options, Kasumi and Rimi had gravitated toward Saya, who still had the paper in her hand. The three of them had examined it and spoken in whispers that Arisa could hear but not discern. Except for Saya, they were now looking to Arisa. Hesitation, expectance, worry, it all showed in their eyes.

Arisa asked, “Are you done yet, Saya?"

Saya didn't even look up at first. Kasumi had to nudge her to get her to notice Arisa's outstretched hand.

"Oh, oops. I got caught up looking at it." She gave the paper back. Arisa placed it on the table and motioned so that the others would come stand behind her so they could all see.

“I’m going to break everything down. I’m open to suggestions, so tell me if I miss anything.”

She drew three circles and in the biggest wrote their names excluding Kasumi’s. In the next, she wrote Kasumi’s, and for the farthest circle, her name and no one else’s.

“So with the exception of Kasumi, we all got into Toshima,” she started to explain, tapping the large circle with the butt of her pencil.

Kasumi heaved a sad sigh. “I’m sorry, everyone...”

“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Arisa told her. Kasumi’s sadness refused to budge. “It’s not the end of the world. Hey, look. Listen—”

She pointed to the circle with Kasumi’s name in it. “We could all ditch Kasumi and go to Toshima, but then we would need to find someone else to play the Random Star.”

She thought her joke would fall flat, but right before the silence turned awkward, Kasumi pouted, half-hearted but indignant nonetheless. Her weak protest let everyone smile and chuckle for a short moment. “Since we can’t do that, to make it more even”—she drew an arrow from the bigger circle to Kasumi’s circle—“one of us can just go to school with her. Boom, easy. So you can quit looking like it’s gonna rain now, Kasumi,” she added pointedly. Kasumi sniffled, and her smile was pathetic, but she did seem to be in better spirits.

“That way, we’re split three and two,” Saya mumbled, pursing her lips. “It’s better than leaving Kasumi out, yeah. You and I would have to do that, right?”

Arisa nodded. “Chofu is farther away than Toshima,” she told her. “We both got in, but between the two of us, it should probably be me who goes. It’ll be easier for you to stay closer to home since you’re always doing stuff at the bakery. Unless you’ve got a preference, that is...”

She let her suggestion hang in the air. Saya hesitated and seemed ready to object but eventually bobbed her head in agreement. “I don’t have a preference. And I really would like to be as close to home as possible. Thanks, Arisa.”

“Then it looks like you, Tae, and Rimi are going to Toshima, and I’m going to Toho Gakuen with Kasumi.” A happy gasp reached her ears right before Kasumi tackled her from behind. Without reacting, she let a loud thoughtful hum build up in the back of her throat. “Actually, I’ve changed my mind. Saya, you go.”

Kasumi shook her. “Wha? No, Arisaaa...”

“Just messing with you, Kas’.” Arisa twisted back and managed to prod her in the side, but Kasumi didn’t let go, only squirmed and giggled.

At that moment, someone leaned across the table and put her finger on the lonesome circle containing Arisa’s name. Arisa followed the hand and arm up to Rimi.

“Don’t you want to go to Tokyo University, Arisa-chan?” she asked, sounding surprised. “You got into such a good school, and it’s really close by to where you live too.”

Though Arisa had expected the question, she didn’t answer immediately. Sure, she would have liked to attend and say she went to the most prestigious school in Japan. Chances were, it would be a good experience. And, as Tae had stressed multiple times, the food would probably be good.

However, even after applying she had never given it a second thought. Thinking on it would only get her hopes up, so to speak. All that had been on her mind was keeping the band together, because staying with them was more important to her than anything else.

High school had been boring for her before Poppin’Party came along. Kasumi and the others had pulled her from a life of truancy, and she wasn’t about to separate herself from them for the sake of going to some school.

“I guess it’s kind of an odd choice,” she admitted, then gave Rimi an unconcerned shrug. “But it’s not like going to a good school matters to me. You, uh, remember how people thought I was a ghost in our first year, right...?” As it turned out, being a ghost in middle school had been as easy as only coming to school on test days. “If what we want is to stay together, it wouldn’t make sense if I suddenly went off to school by myself, would it?”

Rimi shook her head, but from her frown it was easy to tell that while she understood, something about it didn’t sit right with her. Arisa considered explaining it again, but before she could, she saw Tae place a hand on Rimi’s shoulder.

“Rimi,” was all she said. Rimi didn’t react. Arisa, Saya, and Kasumi shared an inquisitive look.

It seemed to dawn on all three of them at once that there was something very important they had been kept in the dark about.

At a loss for words, they could only watch as Rimi’s face worked through a variety of emotions until finally settling on something solemn, her jawline set and eyebrows thick and furrowed. The silence unnerved all of them. Finally, Rimi nodded.

Stepping back from the group as if she shouldn’t be too close, Rimi made her way around the table. Rather than stand in the corner where she usually sat, she stopped directly across the table from her bandmates and friends.

“Rimi-rin?” Kasumi asked in a small, confused voice. Rimi met her eyes and swallowed.

With a deep breath, she announced, “There’s something I need to tell everyone.”

* * *

“You’re... going away?”

Saya whispered as if Rimi would vanish the moment she uttered the words any louder. Her effort to remain calm showed in her eyes like the sun through a threadbare curtain. Kasumi tried to speak, but her voice died in her throat.

“I’m sorry.” Rimi hung her head. Her bangs and the angle of the lights overhead cast a doubly thick shadow across her face. “I kept it to myself. I wanted to say something earlier, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

“How long were you planning this?” Saya asked, swallowing between words. “Have you always wanted to go overseas?”

Rimi responded with a soft shake of her head. “No. I knew I wanted to go to university, but I didn’t plan on going overseas until around August. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

Something turned over in Arisa’s stomach at the word August. That long ago? Almost half a year of planning and they only learned about it now?

For three years, the five of them had been like the best of friends, performed on the same stages, built trust in each other, and the only person among them who had known this was coming was Tae. For months, they as a band had agreed in a unanimous group decision that they all wanted the same thing: to go to university together.

She nearly screamed at Rimi, for how something this vital to the existence of Poppin’Party could go unsaid for so long, for going along with the group despite knowing in the end she would suddenly separate herself. Only by some miracle did she manage to hold it in.

But then came the realization that at some point, Rimi had literally lied to their faces about wanting the same. Any time she could have said she changed her mind or wanted something different. Six months had passed and not once had she brought it up. Arisa understood that everyone kept a side of themselves private—she did herself—but this was more than some silly girls’ secret. Leaving the country wasn’t something to hide from friends who spent so many of their waking hours together. It wasn’t something to announce this close to their shared goal.

There was a roaring noise in her head, like a waterfall of crackling static, that grew louder the longer she tried to keep her mouth shut. Indignation surged and drowned out her better judgement. She pinned Rimi to the wall with her eyes and said, in a voice she wouldn’t have used with a stranger, “You waited until now to tell us?”

Rimi flinched at her words, giving Arisa a twinge of retribution. “How come you didn’t just say something?” she continued, her voice starting to give way from a yell into a plead. “You’ve been planning this for six whole months, and we only got to find out today?” Her anger subsided, drained out through some discreet gutter like dirty rainwater. Nobody looked at her, and she retreated into herself, shamefaced for her outburst and mortified for feeling compensated in hurting Rimi even for a fraction of a second.

The basement room was dead silent until Saya spoke again. “Since August...” she repeated, trailing off as if unsure about everything she said. “I see...”

Following another period of silence, Saya raised another question. Suddenly, Arisa had a word for what she felt from Saya at that moment: desperation.

“Why? Why go?”

Rimi sat down and took longer to answer that question than the last. And when she did, it was something mumbled and vague about wanting to try living outside of Japan, traveling on her own, going to school. “I asked my parents and some of my friends about it,” she elaborated, “and they said the best time to do it was right after I graduate. It’s easier to do now since I’m not tied down to a job or anything. So I applied to study abroad, and well...” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Ah, I see,” Saya said again, weakly. Her response seemed to float on top of the silence, like a leaf on top of a pond, so light and inconsequential that it could never sink any deeper than the surface.

Arisa watched Saya close her eyes and brush her bangs aside with her fingers. In the same movement, Saya wiped her eye with her pinky, and a hint of moisture seemed to sheen in the corners of her eyes.

When Kasumi spoke half a minute later, it was so tense that everyone jumped.

“What about Poppin’Party?” She looked around, but everybody avoided her gaze except Arisa. Kasumi stared into her face, a silent appeal for help, and Arisa felt so sympathetic but so powerless that she had to drop her eyes.

Saya stepped between them then and laid a hand on their shoulders. “Don’t worry Kasumi. We’ll always...” She paused then and her throat bobbed. She tried to make it seem intentional by smiling, though Arisa was sure everyone saw right through it. “Always, be Poppin’Party. Even if we aren’t together all the time. Right, everyone?”

One by one, they all nodded and put on the bravest smiles possible. The atmosphere seemed to lift a little bit. Arisa looked around the room and happened to catch Rimi’s gaze. They both looked away at the same time.

“We can call, and text,” Saya carried on, “and we’ll see each other again after a year, too. Rimi-rin isn’t going to disappear. And if she does, then we’ll look for her and we’ll find her no matter what.” Her last words were spoken while she looked directly at Kasumi, who with a halting sob slumped into Saya’s open arms. Saya patted her on the back, looking like she wanted to cry.

A little choked up herself, Arisa exhaled softly. So this was what it felt like to part with one of their own. Melancholy filled her soul, and she sank deeper into the couch. Rimi was leaving, Kasumi was crying, Saya and Tae had lost all their usual liveliness, and she herself felt like a complete mess. Cold and numb were her two main sensations. In a painful process, she was already starting to cope with the reality of the situation that Saya’s speech had wrought.

Rimi lifted her head and started to apologize again. This time, Saya stopped her.

“You should do what you want to do, Rimi-rin,” she said with the air of a parent holding up their daughter’s dreams. “Don’t ever let anything, not even us, get in the way of that. Especially not us.”

In spite of everything, Saya still managed to find some encouragement to give. No doubt, she was the strongest person out of all of them. Comforting Kasumi, supporting Rimi, all while keeping whatever feelings she had in check. It seemed like her words that brought the chaos to its close. The wounds stayed open, but the bleeding had stopped.

Arisa felt a twisting in her chest, like a key turning in a long-sealed door, and the ice forming a protective wall around her heart shattered into fragments. Hot tears started to drip down her face, unable to be bottled any longer. Nothing she could do could stop them, and she didn’t try to hide; she was long past feeling ashamed to be seen during her weakest moments. Her last stoic act was to close her eyes and cry silently. Teardrops forced their way past her eyelids and slid down her face, and she just waited and let it out.

There was a long moment in which Rimi and Saya held each other’s gazes. Saya whispered something, and Kasumi let go of her slowly before sitting down on the sofa and snatching the tissue box from the table. Kasumi tapped Arisa on the shoulder and handed her four.

The news took a while to sink in. Nobody felt like eating despite all the snacks laid out before them. Arisa poured some melon soda into her cup, dully wondering how the nuclear-green color didn’t put anyone off the stuff. The only reason she was choosing to drink it was because she needed some sugar in her system right now.

“Um.” Arisa, Saya, Kasumi, and Rimi turned to look at Tae, who had yet to say a single word since Rimi’s confession. Tae glanced at all of their faces as she spoke. “I need to say something too. It’s a bad time to say this, but this is also the best time to say it. If that makes sense.”

“It makes no sense,” Arisa quipped with as much of her usual sass as she could muster.

Tae nodded and went on. “I know, but I have to say it anyway. I made up my mind. Since Rimi-rin is going overseas, I want to go to school in Shizuoka.” Before what she said had sunk in, she explained, “It’s not far, only one hour. I can still live in Tokyo.”

Saya’s face blanked. “What?” She sounded shocked, for good reason. If her voice got any weaker, it would disappear completely. “But... that’s still an hour in transit, every day. Do you mean it?”

“Yeah. I’ll be going by myself, but I still want to be a part of Poppin’Party. And I already take the train to school daily, so it’s not that big of a change.” Tae’s face betrayed none of her thoughts as she looked at each of them in turn. Her eyes were set in a serious face, as if this were a formal request for permission. “I really want this,” she said after a few speechless seconds. “Please?”

Hands in her lap, Tae waited. And waited. Ten seconds passed, then twenty. Arisa bit her lip, itching to speak her mind but not trusting herself to get her point across without lashing out. If Tae wanted to go to Shizuoka, then she should go. If Rimi wanted to go study somewhere across the ocean, she should go too. Even if it was going to put more distance between the five of them, who were they to stand in the way of each other?

They were supposed to support each other, not hold each other back. Poppin’Party wouldn’t be what it was without all five of them, but it also wouldn’t be the band it was supposed to be if they had to give up what they wanted just to stay in it.

It was all Arisa could do to acquiesce. This wasn’t what she wanted, nor was it what Kasumi wanted. However, times changed, and nothing could stay the same forever. While the band might be split three ways for a few years, there wasn’t anything to say this was the end of Poppin’Party. She dared to be optimistic: Friends had a way of staying together.

But whatever the future had in store aside, the present was still painful.

Kasumi had been the most excited to graduate and go to university with everyone. This had all probably left her stunned or on the verge of crying again. But as soon as Arisa turned her head to look at her, Kasumi put the tissue box down and stood up.

“O-Tae,” Kasumi said. Where Arisa had expected a rending mix of emotions, there was only her expression. Brow creased, lips drawn into a pale line, eyes hard as rock. “I’m going with you.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "All these things in the present, almost like I'm praying,  
> I want to hold them dear;  
> While singing, while smiling,  
> I want to savor it."

On the light rail going home, the train car shook as it rumbled across the city. Kasumi swayed in place like a piece of kelp, anchored to a handrail dropping down from the ceiling. Her other hand hung by her side, limp.

Evening sunshine coated the floor of the train and the tops of her shoes and her ankles. Everything that wasn’t in shadow seemed to be rendered in a soft light, like the warm tint of a photo filter that turned surroundings orange.

She usually didn’t mind the ride home from Arisa’s house, but today it was excruciating. All it did was give her the time and undisturbed silence to think about how it was looking more and more like Poppin’Party’s time together was coming to an end.

Just one hour ago, they had met up to talk about university and where they were going to go in about a month. It had started out hopeful, but as soon as they got into the details, things had gone downhill.

Kasumi had been the only one who hadn’t gotten into the College of Music. In spite of having been the most adamant out of all of them, telling them at every turn that going to the same university was possible and they were going to make it happen, she had ended up short of the finish line herself.

Getting her first acceptance letter from Toho Gakuen had been so empowering. The day that exams had finished, she had felt so confident in her scores. Sure, she had skipped a few of the headscratchers—but so did everyone, right? Either way, she had passed the requirement for one of the higher-rated schools on her list, and it made her feel like a genius. Her pains had paid off.

But reading rejection, rejection, rejection after that first success had quite literally crushed her mood and all the joy of success she had just experienced. Toho Gakuen began to seem like an accident after she realized she had been rejected by almost every other school she had applied to. Thinking about all the sleep and guitar time she lost for one acceptance letter to the wrong school made her want to cry.

After all the assertions she had made about doing well and going to school together, it ended up being her own inadequacy that had botched their chances. Everyone in the band had told her not to worry about it, but how could she not? How could she feel better about being the only one denied admission when they could have all gone to Toshima?

She was holding them back again. The door was open, and she was the only one who couldn’t walk through.

“Kasumi.” Tae, who always rode the train with her back to their prefecture, spotted the glisten on her face and rose from her seat. “Don’t cry,” she said and put a hand on Kasumi’s shoulder.

“B... but I—” She tried to breathe out quietly, but it came out strangled. “It’s just me, again, and I...”

“It’s not just you. That’s not true.”

Tae’s words brought a little peace back to her mind. But this time, no matter what anyone said, the results wouldn’t change. Kasumi felt hollow but nodded and ignored the sympathetic glances of other curious passengers.

Even if there was nothing she could do or say, Tae was always there to comfort her. Whenever Kasumi needed her, she was always there without needing to be asked, like a true friend.

As if it were impossible for her to break away from negative thoughts, Kasumi’s guilt suddenly resurged. Tae was always there for her and Kasumi appreciated that, but wouldn’t Tae get tired of it at some point? If they went to Shizuoka together, wouldn’t she end up relying on her again and again? She was just going to continue being a burden, someone Tae had to sideline her own dreams to take care of.

Tae wanted to soar—and she had, once. Had she wanted to, she could have flown to the ends of the earth as part of RAISE A SUILEN. But she had turned them down to stay with Poppin’Party. Now Tae had spread her wings again, facing the sun, and Kasumi was in her shadow following her around with wings that couldn’t possibly lift herself off the ground.

And on top of that, she had abandoned the others to go with Tae to Shizuoka. Tae herself had looked surprised when she stood up, though in the same moment she seemed relieved. But the rest of her friends’ faces were painful to remember. Rimi hadn’t been able to meet her eyes, and Saya had looked so sad. And Arisa—

“But it is me,” Kasumi whimpered. For a moment, she felt as if she should just curl up in the corner of the car and miss her stop, miss every stop, and stay until the train powered down and left her stranded in the dark. She didn’t even feel worthy of uttering her friend’s name. “I shouldn’t have done that to her. We made a promise...”

Stricken, she saw Arisa’s face of disbelief and shock, saw her turn away again. It was as if by jumping to go with Tae, some deep trust between Arisa and herself had broken. Kasumi had completely forgotten about the promise they made to stick together in university, not because it didn’t mean anything to her but because it had slipped her mind in the midst of everything else.

But Arisa didn’t know that. And even if she did, it wouldn’t have made it okay for Kasumi to just brush her aside like that.

An electronic beep sounded as the compartment doors opened. Tae led her off the train, one hand on her back guiding her out. The wordless bustle of the train station filled the space for a bit. Then, after exchanging passengers, the train closed its doors and sped off. A few evening travelers shuffled past the two of them toward unknown destinations, but Tae stayed in the bumpy yellow loading zone while Kasumi trembled and cried until her tears dried up.

When Kasumi managed to collect herself and calm her breathing for a minute, Tae's hand fell off her shoulder.

“Good?” she asked.

“Good,” Kasumi lied.

They started walking and left the station. Kasumi walked with Tae in the opposite direction of the tracks even though she lived in a different direction. Tae didn't bring it up. A respectful silence formed between them like a thin sheet of ice on top of a pond.

After walking half a block, Tae’s voice melted the ice and sent a slow ripple through the water. “Are you mad at me, Kasumi?” she asked as they turned left onto a street that would take them toward her house.

The question hung in the air for a few seconds before Kasumi shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m not mad at you at all.”

“What were you thinking when you said you were going to Shizuoka with me?” Tae asked.

Kasumi bit her lip before letting out a sad sigh. “I didn’t want you to have to go to school by yourself. You'll be so far away from the rest of us, and I just... I couldn’t just let you be on your own since I got into the same school. Saya and Arisa don’t have to split up this way either. I thought it would be the best thing to do, but maybe I was wrong. All this time I’ve been trying to keep us all together, but at this point I feel like I’m just dividing us up even more.”

Tae scratched her cheek. “But Rimi is going even farther away,” she pointed out. “Won't she be more on her own than I will?”

“I would have followed her too,” Kasumi shot back, her frustration at her own helplessness reaching a peak for a moment. “But I didn’t know until today, because she never told me anything.”

She looked down. “O-Tae, do you think”—she faltered and wondered if she really needed to ask, since she could anticipate the answer she would get—“do you think Rimi-rin wants to get away from us? From Poppin'Party?”

Tae cast her eyes up to the evening sky which, though free of clouds, showed no stars. “No,” she said after a few seconds. “Rimi-rin likes being a part of the band. I don’t think that’s why she’s going away.”

Upon hearing her suspicions confirmed, Kasumi afforded a smile. “Me neither,” she said. “That just wouldn’t make sense.”

At that moment, a weird feeling overwhelmed her like a solid wave of cold air hitting her in the chest. Thinking it would go away momentarily like the rest of the mixed emotions she had been having as of late, she waited for it to go away. But a minute passed, and her chest still felt tight.

She stopped walking. Tae took a few more steps before noticing Kasumi was no longer by her side, and she turned back.

“Then why?” Kasumi asked, staring at a jagged crack in the sidewalk. “Why is she leaving us behind? How come she never told us anything? Rimi-rin isn’t the type of person to hide things or lie, so why...?”

Without her realizing, her hands had formed fists by her sides. She unclenched them and was shocked to see marks where her nails had pressed into her palms. If it had been painful, she hadn’t noticed.

Tae’s long arm reached out and brushed Kasumi’s bangs away from her eyes. The wind fought to blow them back , but Tae brushed them out of the way a second time without complaint.

“Because,” she said, her face softening. “When you have to choose between your friends and yourself, it’s really hard to do what you want. And when your best friends are like Popipa, it gets even harder.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "That's right,  
> If I'm with you..."

Stepping onto Ichigaya property the day after Poppin’Party’s “future meeting,” as Kasumi had called it, gave Rimi a sense of misbelonging. What had transpired in their basement hideout yesterday made her feel more like a stranger than a friend even though she came here nearly every other day.

Arisa’s family owned Ryuseido, or the Shooting Star, a pawn shop. Any old unwanted items from her parents’ time, any things that people came in to sell, the Ryuseido displayed in and on top of boxes set up like a warehouse bazaar.

Because so many people heard about it through word of mouth, every once in a while a customer looking for the pawnshop entered the wrong gate and ended up in the front yard. When Arisa found them, she politely kicked them out saying, “Out the gate and to your right, please. You’re currently trespassing on private property.”

Rimi stood in front of the entrance for a while. All the doors of Arisa’s home were closed. On the second floor, the curtains of Arisa’s bedroom were drawn. She couldn’t pick out a single sign that anyone was home.

Even though she knew better, she couldn’t help but imagine Arisa kicking her out like a lost customer if she saw her. A lot of things made Arisa mad, but rarely did anything make her upset like the way she had been yesterday. And most of her enmity had been targeted at Rimi, too. Over the past day, Rimi’s conscience had been on full blast as the memory played back in her head on an intermittent, uncontrollable loop.

This far from the main street, the nonstop noises of the city she was used to—electrical whirring, the distant rumble of trains, and occasionally the sound of a car engine as it rolled through tight residential streets—didn’t reach. Here, she could hear the ambience of the city that was always there but also always buried under the louder hustle and bustle of human life. Leaves brushed together by the wind, creaky wooden doors, barking dogs. Left of the gate, water splished at the edges of a small pond encircled by rocks.

Two years ago, Rimi would not have come back so soon. When conflict broke out and sore spots were struck, she tended to retreat both literally and figuratively: to her room, where she could watch TV or play games for a while. It helped calm her down, and she didn’t have to deal with drama, which she had never been good at.

The last time she had done that, however, had caused a lot of trouble she could have easily avoided. It had been in their first year of school, when she had run away after Arisa got mad at her for asking for help writing a new song. Sure, she had also been recovering from a cold at the time, but after getting better her sickness became her excuse to put off seeing Arisa for a few more days.

At the time, she hadn’t considered how much her absence had weighed on Arisa’s conscience. Arisa had felt responsible for hurting her feelings, and that guilt had only grown in size the longer Rimi didn’t show up to school. Rimi hadn’t realized the extent Arisa had worried about her until they finally talked again. That night, she had gone to bed with a sense of self-loathing for having been too much of a coward to face her friends.

In the end, Rimi hadn’t been able to avoid dealing with that awkward first moment together after a fight anyway, and it had passed in a flash when the two of them were face to face again. The difference in what actually happened and what she had been scared of was so huge that looking back, she could hardly understand why she had been so scared in the first place.

By knowing which of her fears were irrational and taking the first step, she could have solved so many of the problems that plagued her relationships. That thought was what had brought her to Arisa’s house today, when the echo of their altercation was still fresh in her mind. Even if Arisa didn’t want to see her, she wanted to try and patch things up here and now.

Rimi needed to make sure she said everything she needed to say. She was going to assume responsibility, because she was the one who had broken trust in the first place. This time, she would set the splint so they would grow together again and not apart.

That was to say, she thought with a glance at the motionless house, if she could even find the person she needed to talk to.

Rimi’s shoes kicked gravel onto the sidewalk as she made her way to the warehouse and tried the door. Wood thudded against a deadbolt, but she tried again anyway, hoping vainly that it would open if she pulled harder. Maybe it was a push door and not a pull door, she thought, just as she heard the scatter of pebbles behind her.

“It’s locked,” said a voice. Rimi let out an embarrassing squeak and spun around. Arisa blinked lazily in response.

“Arisa-chan,” Rimi blurted and stopped. For all her determination to speak with Arisa, her brain froze up. She just couldn’t find the right words, if the right words even existed.

After a long, clumsy pause, Arisa nodded. “I, uh, saw you from my room.” She gestured back toward the house at her bedroom window. The curtains were open.

“Oh,” Rimi said.

Another pause. Rimi lowered her eyes. Arisa tapped the toe of her black flip flops on the ground. Shifting her weight, she crossed her arms loosely. She appeared just as unsure about how to proceed as Rimi.

“You, uh... want to go down to the basement?” she asked, pointing weakly toward the door.

* * *

They descended the stairs into the familiar basement room. An air of somber recollection rolled in like thick mist and brought with it a few recent unhappy memories. It seemed to stifle any chances there had been of making small talk, not that Rimi had come to chat about the weather.

Neither of them seemed very comfortable. Arisa seemed to stay near the stairs, but Rimi also wanted to stay near the stairs, so they ended up shuffling toward the center of the room, where Kasumi and Tae liked to stand while they practiced.

The basement was about as large as the first floor of the warehouse, so it was actually quite spacious, but at present the walls seemed to have closed in. It was hard to imagine their band of five playing their instruments here comfortably. They had probably gotten used to it over the years, but Rimi had to wonder how they had even managed to fit an audience of fifteen in this claustrophobic space along with them.

Rimi shook her head lightly and tried to focus on the present. She hadn’t come to reminisce. Arisa stood next to the entrance, her shoulder pressed against the fifth or sixth step. A glassiness shone in her eyes, which had settled on the corner of the floor.

With a step in her direction, Rimi got her attention. Arisa’s eyes snapped up, and her posture improved almost imperceptibly. “So, what is it?” she asked uneasily.

Rimi breathed in through her nose and gulped. “I came to apologize,” she said after making sure her voice worked.

Arisa closed her mouth and was quiet for a second. “About yesterday?” she asked, surprised. Rimi shook her head.

“Not just yesterday. For the last six months. For not saying anything to you even though I should have told you way earlier.”

At that, Arisa didn’t respond immediately. She seemed speechless, the implications of which Rimi could not pinpoint exactly. Rimi watched her face closely for any trace of resentment or sorrow but saw nothing of the sort. So she went on:

“Originally, I planned on telling you all the way back when I decided I wanted to study abroad,” she said wringing her hands. “At first I didn’t want to say anything because I wasn’t sure if I would even make it into the program anyway. And I also thought that maybe if I waited a little, one of you would bring up something similar, and it would be easier for me to talk about it. But nobody ever did, and I ended up waiting for something that never happened. Eventually, I just became too scared to say anything at all.

“I know it’s silly to be scared over something like that. You’re all my friends, so it just doesn’t make sense. But the longer I waited, the more scared I was to say something. There wasn’t any easy way to bring it up. I even started hoping that I would just fail the test, and that way it wouldn’t even matter, because I wouldn’t even have to say anything. And then I got accepted.

“But even then, if O-Tae-chan hadn’t been there to give me a push, I don’t know if I would have been able to say a thing. I know you’re mad at me, and you have every right to be. I know it might be too much to forgive, but I owe you another apology. I don’t have any other excuses... I’m sorry for being a bad friend.”

An electronic whine disturbed the quiet in the wake of her speech. Arisa went over to the microphone stand and pressed a few buttons until it stopped. She stood there for a moment running her fingers down the black and silver metal. Rimi’s only guess as to her thoughts was the contemplative line of her mouth.

“You know, I...” Arisa broke off and contorted her face. “Rimi, I...” She stopped again, this time with a glower. “God, I can’t even speak right now.”

Rimi shook her head. “Take your time,” she said as helpfully as she could.

With not even a glance in Rimi’s direction, Arisa went over to the sofa and sat down. She slouched forward, elbows on her knees.

“Listen,” she said. Her voice was firm but also more wistful than it was commanding. “I didn’t mean to go off on you yesterday, Rimi. I just—I just kind of...”

Arisa ground to a halt and sighed, though it sounded more like a growl than anything. “Sorry,” she said in a low, clipped voice. Rimi got the sense that her exasperation was aimed at herself more than anyone. So she sat down next to Arisa.

They sat there for a while, Arisa wringing her hands and Rimi waiting for Arisa to collect herself. As much as Rimi wanted to allow Arisa to speak, the worried voice in her head started whispering the longer the silence stretched on. Finally, when Rimi noticed Arisa digging her nails into the back of her right hand, she couldn’t stay quiet any longer.

“You had a good reason,” she said, taking Arisa’s hand and gently pulling it into her lap. Arisa looked her in the eye. There was still a frustrated look about her. Rimi lowered her eyes briefly to glance at the crescent-shaped craters in Arisa’s hand. She ran her thumb across them.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I cause a lot of problems because that’s just the kind of person I am. I make so many mistakes that you can’t help but get frustrated. We’ve always been like this, right?” Rimi tried out a smile hoping Arisa would do the same—and she did. “But I couldn’t ever hold it against you. You’re a really nice person most of the time, and I know you’re always looking out for us, so whenever you’re mad at me there’s usually a good reason for it.”

Arisa lowered her eyes, but after a moment her head bobbed in agreement. At that, Rimi grinned. “Even though we argue all the time, we are still friends, right?”

“Yeah,” Arisa said after a few seconds, breathing out as she did. “Of course. I mean, Saya said yesterday, better than I could’ve... ‘We’ll always be Poppin’Party,’ or something like that, no?” Rimi smiled. “It’s not Poppin’Party if we aren’t there for each other, right?”

Rimi agreed and put a hand over her chest. “Right,” she agreed, feeling her heart swell. Poppin’Party was a group of friends just as much as it was a band—before it was a band, even. Relief blossomed in her chest, her relationship with her close friend feeling secure once more.

“I’m glad we cleared that up, Arisa-chan,” Rimi thanked her. “Again, I’m really sorry for not saying something earlier.”

She released Arisa’s hand and stood up. Just as she was about to excuse herself so that she didn’t overstay her welcome, Arisa reached out. Rimi stopped.

“Sorry, Arisa stuttered. Her fingers clung to Rimi’s hand in a surprisingly firm hold. “This, er...” She faltered and took a second to recollect herself. “You know how the others do that holding hands thing sometimes, and I end up having to join in...”

“Oh, that.” Rimi nodded and laughed a little so that it might help Arisa relax. She knew where Arisa was coming from; this particular habit of Poppin’Party’s was difficult to explain seriously. Saya, Tae, and Kasumi were all very quick to tease about this kind of thing, so Rimi refrained from making any kind of comment or sudden move out of respect, as if Arisa would dart away at the slightest hint of mischief.

“Well, here goes,” Arisa said in a quiet voice.

Holding their hands steadily together, Arisa pressed the fingers of her hand into Rimi’s palm. Instinctively, Rimi’s fingers curled and brushed the top of Arisa’s. They were trembling, like with the strain of someone putting all their strength into their fingertips. There was something in her grip that Rimi couldn’t sum up in one word. Conviction, concentration, nerves. A little bit of fear, even. It all took her by surprise, and her eyes widened.

“We just want you to be happy, you know.” Arisa’s voice was a whisper in the tiny basement room. “That’s all we want. So whatever that means to you, you’d better do it.”

Then, in one fluid motion, Arisa pulled her hand away, stood up, and gave Rimi a tight and sudden hug. It happened so quickly that Rimi could barely register she was being hugged before it was over. Arisa drew away, eyes averted, but after a second lifted her head and looked Rimi in the eye.

The half-smile on her face in that moment was the most complicated thing Rimi had ever seen.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "When I'm with everyone,  
> Let's lift our hands to the sky.  
> Ah, the future is  
> On the palm of our open hands—  
> It's almost overflowing,  
> With how bright it is!"

Even with an ear pressed to the door, Saya couldn’t hear a thing from inside the Hanazono household. No one must have heard her knock, so she rapped her knuckles on the wood again and waited. She eyed the tiny beige button for the doorbell. Even though it had been broken for a few months now and Tae certainly knew about it, it still hadn’t been fixed. Saya pressed it in a few times then sighed. Nothing happened, as expected.

Hearing no footsteps or other sounds of inhabitancy from within the house made her more anxious than usual. She fixed her sweater and leaned against the wall. A breeze sent some of her hair into her face, so she pushed it behind her ear.

A full day had passed since their so-called strategy meeting for university. Even then, it still felt unreal.

Saya knew everything she could recall had truly happened. Her lips still remembered the shape of the words she had spoken. And forgetting the shifts in her friends’ faces after every minute would be impossible. So many stunned stares, bitten lips. So many teary wrinkles under eyes, so many actual tears.

But somehow, the actuality of it eluded her. In what reality would Rimi announce she was leaving the band? What twisted series of events would lead to Tae announcing that she would be doing the same, and then Kasumi with her? Taking everything into consideration—the level of intimacy they shared with each other, the months they had spent preparing for university, their shared goal of going to school together once more—the day before yesterday never should have happened.

Saya hated it.

After waiting for almost three minutes, she pulled out her phone to ask Tae if she was home, only to stop when footsteps approached the front door from the inside. She dropped her phone back into her pocket and made sure she was standing up straight when the door opened to reveal a woman she recognized as Tae’s mother, dressed in a green cotton shirt and khaki pants. A strand of hair dropped down across her forehead from her perfectly swept bangs.

Saya gave her best customer service smile and started speaking. “Hello—”

Mrs. Hanazono’s eyes widened. “Oh, hello! You’re one of Tae’s friends! It’s been such a long time. I nearly forgot your face.” Bearing a radiant smile typical of mothers meeting their children’s best friends, she tugged Saya inside. “Arisa-chan, was it? It’s so good to see you.”

“I’m Saya, actually.”

“Oh, dear, my apologies. Saya-chan! Either who, sorry for not answering the door earlier. I thought Tae would get it since I told her I was going out to the back yard to feed our kids. Ah, oops.” She released Saya and took a step back. Saya glanced at her wrist and saw that her skin was now a little smudged with dirt. “I forgot I was working in the garden. I wasn’t expecting visitors. I’ll go wash up right away.

“Tae is in her room, down this way and last on the right,” she told Saya, directing her to the hallway. “I’ll whip up some refreshments, so why don’t you hang out with Tae in the meantime?”

Saya nodded and Tae’s adult counterpart whisked off, leaving her at the mouth of the hallway, which for a lack of windows was dimmer than the rest of the house. Music was playing from somewhere, and as she proceeded down the hall the source became apparent.

Tae’s door was decorated with vinyl stickers of guitars, rabbits, and a juicy-looking hamburg steak atop a crisp lettuce leaf bearing all the toppings. Even though it was closed, she could make out a riff from “Hanazono Electric Guitar”, a song Tae had written about the things she liked.

“I’m coming in...” she said out loud as she knocked and turned the knob.

As soon as Saya opened the door, the music swelled from a faint echo to a pulse bouncing off the walls. Tae bent over her guitar, fingers flying, shoulders turned toward the TV stand against the far wall. The two double speakers her guitar was hooked up to were on full blast to the point where Saya could feel the reverb in her bones. Tae didn’t notice her come in.

“O-Tae,” Saya called. “O-Tae!”

The music came to an abrupt halt as if the speakers had shut off mid-song. Tae turned and saw her standing in the doorway.

“Saya?” she said, surprised.

“Hi. I came to visit.” Saya entered and sat down next to Tae. Tae seemed a little guilty as she took off her guitar strap. “You’ll hurt your hearing if you play loud like that all the time,” Saya said as Tae got up and walked her guitar over to its case.

“I don’t usually,” Tae replied. “It makes me feel better whenever I do though.”

“I kind of get what you mean.” Saya sighed. She was quiet while Tae placed her blue guitar in its guitar-shaped slot and fiddled with a few buttons. Tae packing her guitar away was unusual already— other days if anyone walked in while Tae was playing, Tae would continue albeit at a lower volume.

“Did my mom open the door for you?” Tae asked her.

Saya nodded. “She thought you would get it, so she didn’t answer at first. I guess she didn’t realize you hadn’t heard me knock.”

Tae apologized and closed the hard black cover. In one smooth draw of her hand, she zipped it closed.

“Usually you call before you visit,” Tae pointed out as she sat down next to Saya again. “Did something happen?”

“No,” Saya said, shaking her head, “nothing happened.”

“Then is there something you want to talk about?”

Saya’s natural instinct was to shake her head again, but she hesitated. Nothing in particular had brought her to Tae’s doorstep. She had just been out for a walk and ended up on the same street. But with all that had happened lately, maybe she did need to talk. And now that Tae had mentioned it, maybe Saya did have some things she wanted to say.

Maybe something subconscious had brought her here to Hanazono Land. Tae really did have an uncanny ability of always being right on the nose about these things.

“There has been something on my mind,” Saya admitted. But she didn’t know immediately how to go on, so she looked down at her lap and sucked on her lip for a while. Tae nodded, as if that were all she needed to know.

They sat quietly for about a minute. Saya laced her fingers together, unlaced them, then did it again. Tae studied a print on the wall and a pile of sheet music on her table. Saya got the impression that Tae was waiting for her to speak, but not in an impatient way—more like she didn’t see a need to rush, so she was giving her time to collect herself. Saya thanked her silently.

“Rimi was serious,” she began, her mouth twisting as she broached the topic, “when she said she meant to go overseas, huh?”

Tae hummed once in response and glanced at Saya before redirecting her eyes to the top of the wall. “I think so. Rimi-rin doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean very often, unless it’s April Fools’. She tricked me once.”

“She tricked you?” Saya lifted an eyebrow.

Tae nodded and explained. “She texted me and said I left a rabbit at her house. So I went outside to count my rabbits, but they were all there. Then I got another text from her that said ‘just kidding! It’s April 1.’”

The image of pure, angelic Rimi of all people giggling over such a harmless prank made Saya smile. “She must have known you would immediately go check on them.”

“Yeah. The funny thing is I hadn’t even brought my rabbits over recently. Don’t you think she must prank a lot of people? She’s pretty good at it.”

Saya tried not to laugh, though she was tempted to point out that Rimi was the least likely person from their band to have much of a background in practical jokes. Instead she said, “Maybe she just knows you really well.”

“That could be true too,” Tae admitted. “She seems to trust me too. Before she made it public that she was going overseas, she told me about it in secret.”

Holding her surprise in, Saya glanced at Tae. “Really?” she asked.

“Well, maybe I just happened to be there at the right place at the right time. It could have been like, she just needed to tell someone about it and it didn’t matter who that person was.” Tae put a hand under her chin. "Maybe if you were there, she would have told you instead. She seemed like she was really... what’s the word... controubled?”

“Conflicted?”

“That’s it."

Saya looked past Tae at the shelf set that held up her speakers and TV set. Next to the shelves was a bushy potted plant as tall as Tae. She wondered how long the thing had been in her room; it had been there ever since the first time Saya had visited back in their first year of high school, and it didn’t appear to have changed ever since.

“She never told me about it,” Saya blurted out. All her carefully shelved thoughts suddenly collapsed, falling to the floor in a haphazard fit of emotions. “Rimi never said anything to me about going away for college. After all this time, she never said a thing, even though she comes by the bakery almost every day. We talk every day, so how... how...” Her voice failed her like a lightbulb spitting sparks as it ran out of power.

“Saya...” Tae said her name in a sad tone.

“That just doesn’t seem very fair, does it?” She smiled, thinking she would put on a brave face, but it turned out bitter. Silently, she apologized to Tae for having to deal with her when she was acting like this. It would have been better if she had stayed home today. “That isn’t fair at all...”

“Saya,” Tae said a moment after she finished. She held her arms out wide, like a scarecrow in a field.

Saya looked at her in confusion. “What?”

“A hug,” Tae said. “You look like you need it, so you can hug me for a bit.”

Her offer lingered in the air. Tae’s was a very strange way to offer comfort, that was for sure, but her sincerity was infallible. Despite her heart feeling like it weighed forty pounds, Saya couldn’t help but give a small laugh. She scooted closer, and Tae wrapped her lanky arms around her.

Saya felt a little awkward at first, but being so close to Tae restored some of the nerves she had lost. People taller than herself always seemed to have this kind of protective aura, and so she loved being close to them. Having Tae embrace her, even if they were just friends, made her feel a little calmer.

They didn’t say anything to each other. After some time, Saya put her own arms behind Tae’s back and leaned in. Tae smelled like music. Saya mumbled into her shirt.

“O-Tae, I don’t want you to go. I’ll miss you. And if Rimi is gone too, I’ll feel...” Her mind blanked. She swallowed and held Tae tighter. “I don’t even want to think about it. I don’t want anyone to disappear. I should have told everyone sooner, but I... I didn’t.”

An uncomfortable warm feeling started to rise up behind her eyes, so she breathed slowly through the side of her mouth and held her breath. She waited to feel Tae tense up or fidget or otherwise react negatively to her words. But instead, Tae put her hand on Saya’s head and rubbed her hair.

“Okay.” She guided Saya’s head to her shoulder. Tae’s fingers worked her hair as if she were fingering her guitar, and Saya closed her eyes. The weight on her mind eased off and nearly disappeared.

“I’m sorry Saya,” Tae murmured to her. “I get it’s been hard for you, but don’t worry. I’m sure things will work out.”

“Really?” Saya challenged her quietly, feeling bad for acting like a spoiled child. Tae was just trying to make her feel better. But Tae just nodded and kept stroking her hair.

“Really,” she reiterated. Then, “By the way, tell me when we’ve hugged enough. I’ll go until you tell me to stop.”

Saya laughed again.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We met in spring! And in summer, I thought—  
>  _(Please stay the same—)_  
>  I felt it in autumn! And in winter, I wished—  
>  _(As it is now!)"_

“Rimi, can you come downstairs real quick?”

Sitting in her room an hour after dinner, Rimi heard her mom’s voice come bouncing up from the first floor. After a moment, she stood up and headed down the stairs.

Before she entered the living room, she could see the lights were dimmed in a way that made her feel as if she were underground. In the direction of the dining table was a wavering orange glow. Five candles flickered atop a pink-and-white cake like the points of a flaming star, and on the other side of the table her parents started to clap and put their hands in the air.

“Congratulations!” They yelled as she approached the table. Her mom fired off a party popper, and confetti filled the room for a few seconds. A few streamers landed on the cake, and she hurriedly removed them without ruining the frosting.

“We got you a cake to celebrate, our little university girl,” her mom said. She looked at Rimi and smiled, her teeth reflecting a bit of orange light in the dim.

Her dad put an arm around her mom’s shoulders and held out his other hand toward Rimi. “You might not think it,” he said in a warm voice, “but you’re an incredible girl to have accomplished what you have. It’s not every day you get to fly overseas for school. Come stand over here, we have one more surprise for you too.”

When Rimi walked over and stood next to him, he pulled a cloth off an object on the table. Suddenly her sister was there on a tablet screen, her long hair in an updo and her college dorm room behind her darkened as if she were right there in the room with them.

“Congratulations, Rimi!” Yuri said with a wave and a brilliant smile. “I can’t be there to celebrate with you in person, but I hope this is enough to make it feel like I am.” She reached toward the screen and picked up a wax candle in a clear glass container, brightening half her face until she put it back down.

“Hi Sis,” Rimi said, returning the smile as best she could. Her dad put a hand on her shoulder, and she turned around. His deep brown eyes seemed to absorb the flickering light of the candles. “Thanks for doing all of this for me.”

“Don’t mention it, sweetie.” He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

Her mom gestured to the cake and told her to blow out the candles. “You don’t have to make a wish,” she said, “but if there’s something you want to wish for, you definitely can.”

Rimi watched the little flames flicker. Wax dripped down the side of a candle like treacle. As she tried to think of a fitting wish, her thoughts strayed to the other members of her band and what they were doing right now. With three short puffs, she blew out the five candles. Her mom turned on the lights in the room, and her family gave a smattering of applause.

“Okay Rimi, it’s your turn to cut the cake.” Her mom handed her a cake slicer with a blunt serrated edge. Rimi recognized it; a thin piece of plastic shaped into a hollow triangle, the same one they always used to cut cakes. Two years ago, Yuri had used it to cut the cake their parents had gotten for her graduation. Now it was her turn.

“Serve yourself as big a slice as you want,” her mom said as she pulled out candles. “We won’t judge! Remember how big Yuri’s slice was?”

“Mom! I told you, I just wanted to share some with Nana!”

Her mom gave no indication of acknowledging her daughter’s protests except for a glint in her eyes. “Your father picked out the flavor, so if it’s not your favorite then take it up with him. And I’ll bring you out to pick up another cake!”

Her dad dismissed it with a flap of his hand and said, “Of course it’s her favorite. Right Rimi?” He winked at her, and she smiled and nodded.

Rimi placed the serrated edge on top of the cake and brought it down in one clean slice. The blade came out coated in chocolate. She held it over the cake at about forty-five degrees to make the second cut, but after a moment’s thought she moved it in and gave herself a thinner slice.

Her parents and sister watched as she lifted the thin piece of cake onto her plate. “That’s all you want?” Her mom seemed surprised, but a smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

“She’s making sure she can have a second slice later,” her dad said with a laugh.

“Do you mind if I bring the tablet up to my room so I can talk with Sis?” Rimi asked.

Her parents nodded. “Yuri’s been wanting to catch up with you,” her dad mentioned as he handed her the tablet. “We can’t force you to be around your old man and woman all the time, huh? Haha!”

Rimi laughed with them. Excusing herself, she went back toward the stairs to her room. At the base of the stairs she turned around and saw her parents watching her. She gave them one more smile, hoping they could tell that she was really grateful and not trying to get away from them. It relieved her to see them smile back, and she continued up the stairs leaving the half-lit dining room behind her.

“Not in the mood for family?” crackled her sister’s voice. “O... s, the connection. There we go.”

“I wouldn’t say that...” Rimi answered.

In her room, she put the cake on her desk and propped the tablet up so she could sit in her chair with her hands free and be in front of the camera. It had been a while since she got to talk with her older sister, and a smile came easily to her face as they looked at each other.

“How’s college?” she asked. “Is it hard having to speak another language all the time?”

“Oh, I got used to it.” Her sister grinned. “You do what you gotta do,” she said in English. It sounded like slang, and she spoke a bit slower than she did in Japanese, but she still sounded pretty fluent.

“I see,” Rimi said, clapping a few times just for fun. “That’s good!”

“So I heard from Mom and Dad that you decided to go overseas too. I had no idea that was what you wanted until they called me and told me about it.”

Rimi nodded. It had been a secret to most people. She herself hadn’t even given it much thought until her parents started asking her around testing season what plans she had for the future.

At least Yuri didn’t seem mad about it. Not that she had anything to be mad about; the way they had been raised, they didn’t tend to be jealous or envious of each other very often. If anything, Yuri sounded more curious than anything.

“What made you decide to go overseas?” Yuri asked, pulling Rimi from her thoughts.

For a moment, Rimi hesitated. That was all it took for Yuri’s face to turn observant, her eyes keen like a cat’s. Rimi coughed and pretended to reach for her slice of cake.

“It’s good to study abroad, right?” she explained, feeling as if she were stumbling over her own words. “You get to see what other places are like, and you have a lot of new experiences.”

But Yuri called her out. “That’s exactly the thing Mom and Dad say about it,” she said with a face that gave nothing away. “I’m asking why you”—she said it with emphasis on the _you—_ “want to do it.”

Yuri’s astuteness stopped Rimi in her tracks. Rimi wasn’t sure what kind of answer her sister wanted from her. The whole point of high school was to prepare for entrance exams and university, so naturally she had aimed this high. Studying overseas was like the culmination of her education and an experience she had been striving to have, right? Her sister had done the exact same thing.

She mumbled an “I don’t know,” and Yuri made a pensive noise in the back of her throat.

“I just want you to realize what you’re getting into,” her sister said, peering through the screen into Rimi’s face. “I left everything I knew behind. My friends, my band, our parents, and you. Trust me when I say it’s not easy being a thousand miles away from the people you like being around. I miss you all the time, you know. Not to say you won’t meet new people, but the ones you do know already, you’ll have to accept that they have no choice but to move on with or without you.”

Rimi’s stomach sank. “Right,” she said, nodding to her sister’s words. “Right,” she said, feeling anything but at that moment.

Did she really understand what she was getting into? A few days ago, she had felt assured her choice was fine, but now her confidence wavered. When her sister laid it all out for her, the whole what-if situation of leaving her friends behind seemed a lot more grim than she had originally thought.

“What about your band?” Yuri asked after a beat. “Aren’t you going to be leaving them behind?”

“I... yeah. They’re staying in Japan.”

“I see.” Yuri was quiet after saying that. “It’s not the end of the world,” she continued after a few seconds had passed, “but it could be the end of your time with them. You never know what could happen in a year’s time. Not to be pessimistic or anything.”

“What happened with GuriGuri?” Rimi suddenly asked. She didn’t mean to change the topic, but the question had sprung to mind when Yuri asked about Poppin’Party.

“Oh, I heard from Nana that the three of them still practice, just not as much. I do too.” Yuri moved to the side so that Rimi could see her guitar propped up against the back wall. “They say when I come back to Japan, we’ll reform and write the lyrics to a new song, and that’ll be our big hit. Who knows, it might even turn out that way too.”

“Uh huh... I hope so. That would be really cool if it did!”

“I know, right?”

While they talked, Rimi found that she was smiling more than she had in a while. She even remembered the cake, and as soon as she took a bite she wished she had given herself a bigger slice. Chocolate cream reminded her of pastries from Saya’s bakery, and the sweet pink icing was reminiscent of the Valentine’s Day cookies that Poppin’Party traded every year.

“I can’t stay too long,” Yuri finally said. In the back of her mind, Rimi had known this moment was coming. She had just chosen not to think about it. “My roommate’s still asleep, and we’re going on a mini trip with a couple of her friends later today, so I need to go pack my stuff. It was good catching up with you Rimi!”

“You too, Sis. Have fun on your trip!”

“Will do! Make sure you spend as much time with your friends as you can before you leave, okay?” With one last smile and wave, Yuri ended the call. Rimi exited the app and turned off the screen.

For a while, she sat in her chair staring at the black surface of the powered-down tablet. She had finished all her cake, and it had been delicious, but all of a sudden she no longer wanted seconds.

Her sister had used the the very words she herself had told Tae months ago: not the end of the world. Not the end of the world if Poppin’Party wasn’t together for college. But it could be the end of her time with them. The phrase wouldn’t leave her head no matter how much she tried not to think about it.

Leaving the empty plate on her desk, she lay down on her bed and stared at the planks supporting her sister’s undisturbed mattress. Now that she thought about it, her sister not only lived in a different place but also a different timezone. Between Yuri and Rimi, there was an eight hour gap. Right now it was still early morning for her; a little bit of sunlight had been streaming through the gaps in her blinds. Didn’t that make it all the more harder to stay in touch with the rest of GuriGuri? They couldn’t really call without planning it out in advance, and university was already full of things that took up a lot of time.

Texting worked better, but messaging someone didn’t feel the same as when you saw them face to face. And of the members of Poppin’Party, only Arisa made herself consistently available; Saya only checked her phone at specific times each day, and Kasumi was terribly forgetful at times. As for Tae, she literally didn’t receive notifications, so there was no pattern to her responses. They met up in person so often that it didn’t matter, but now that Rimi thought about it, having a proper conversation with them via text messages would be a nightmare.

Her mind spiraled down paths she would have preferred not to consider. A sudden wave of guilt washed over her—for keeping secrets, for not thinking about her friends’ feelings, for locking herself away instead of being brave enough to be near them. The longer she lay in bed, the smaller and smaller she started to feel, as if the universe around her was expanding and she was only getting smaller.

She rolled over onto her stomach and reached for her phone, wishing briefly that she had someone to talk to. Opening up her contacts list, she stared at the screen and realized with a pang that this was the feeling that would likely pursue her for years if she went off to university on her own. This feeling of loneliness and wanting to hug a living, breathing friend but only having stuffed animals nearby.

Rimi put her phone down and rolled back to the middle of her bed. Looking up at her sister’s bunk, she tried to imagine how many times Yuri had done the same thing as she did just now.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The days of youth that feel like they're pouring down;  
> Straighten your back and give chase!  
> This irreplaceable season—  
> It's heartrending..."

An entire night sky laid out before her eyes, Kasumi sat on the porch beside Arisa while Mami, Arisa’s grandmother, rinsed pots and bowls in the kitchen sink. Stars dotted the sky like blurry flecks of gold buried in a twilight cloth. The moon was out of sight, and except for a faint amount of starlight, the yard was dark.

They sat together like this often. Watching the night sky together had been a custom of theirs ever since they had watched fireworks explode all across the sky two years ago, at a festival she couldn’t remember the exact name of right now. But she could still recall the feeling of the lights as they faded into the glow of the stars, reflected in the surface of the pond. She could still recall the way the night wind had reminded her to blink as she tried to burn the fireworks into her brain. At the time she had sat next to Arisa too, and since all of Poppin’Party had been there on that small creaky wooden step together, they had pressed close to make room.

Now, they sat like backlit strangers, two feet apart watching a sky with no fireworks fizzing up and no showers of sparks raining down. At least there were still stars.

Since the future meeting, their group chat had been totally silent. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, though. The rare times they had arguments usually culminated in a drought of texts. But they always forgave each other, no matter how thin the ice seemed to get.

Right now, it had been a few days with no progress toward a resolution. But something would happen soon. They would all be in the same place once again, and then they would make up. Or, at least, Kasumi hoped so.

She had come to Arisa’s house, eyes lowered, and Arisa had been quick to let her in. Though they had yet to say much of anything to each other, the silence was less tense than it was awkward. Awkwardness was one of those things that, from Kasumi’s experience, softened up with time. So they had gone out to the backyard and sat down on the step together, to let the awkwardness work itself out slowly.

Although Kasumi sat here with Arisa all the time—once or twice a week, usually—the only thing she could think about was a memory from months ago, when she had sat in this exact spot and made a promise that she had broken just two days ago.

“What the—” Arisa blurted out, sounding slightly flabbergasted. “Kasumi, why the heck are you crying? Literally neither of us has said anything yet!”

“Sorry,” Kasumi sniffled and smiled out of embarrassment. “I didn’t even realize.”

Arisa sighed and shook her head, as if this happened all the time and she was in the process of getting used to it.

Now that the silence had been broken—Arisa’s vocal gut reaction was something to be thankful for—the weird feeling surrounding them seemed to have dissipated. Kasumi wiped her eyes and cleared her throat.

“I’m not going to Shizuoka,” she announced. The two of them looked directly at each other, Kasumi feeling like the weaker of the two as she tried to match Arisa’s inscrutable eyes. “I thought it over, and I just... I can’t. At the time, I thought it would be for the best, but later I realized I had no idea what I was doing. And I don’t want to leave you or Saya behind.”

Arisa looked at Kasumi for a few seconds more before she turned her head out toward the yard. After a few seconds, she said, “I see,” and they were both quiet for a short while. “Me saying it doesn’t matter much at this point, but if you had gone through with it, I—well...” Arisa drew her lips into a line as she thought about how to finish her sentence. “We would have supported your decision, is what I’m trying to say.”

Kasumi smiled. “No,” she said, disagreeing with what Arisa had said earlier. “You saying that still means a lot to me. Thanks, Arisa.” Arisa nodded without looking directly at her. Kasumi wanted to say her face was red, but she couldn’t really tell because of how dark it was.

Not looking for anything in particular, she scanned the heavens, which twinkled when she stared for a long time at the same spot without moving her gaze. “Popipa has been through a lot,” she said in a quiet voice.

In the corner of her eye, Arisa glanced at her. “Where’d this come from?” she asked.

“I dunno,” was all Kasumi could say. “But it’s true, and I just felt like saying it.”

Behind them in the kitchen, Arisa’s grandmother turned off the water.

“How do you feel about the band breaking up?” Arisa glanced at her again, only this time she did not look away. Kasumi felt compelled to meet her eyes, and in them she saw Arisa’s typical hardiness.

“Poppin’Party isn’t breaking up,” she said without so much as a second thought. She repeated herself, her confidence growing by the second. “Poppin’Party won’t break up. If all of us love being in the band as much as I do, then there’s no chance that will happen.”

“What makes you think that?” Arisa’s eyes pierced her. “What if we don’t all love the band at the same level you do? What happens then?”

For that, Kasumi didn’t have an immediate answer. Arisa’s expression never changed as she turned her attention back to the sky. Her grandmother walked to her bedroom to get ready for a bath, leaving the room light on for them. Minutes passed, and neither of them said a word.

Kasumi took a deep breath that filled her lungs, and she exhaled as slowly as she could. The feeling of old air leaving her lungs and new air rushing in to take its place gave her a momentary rush, as if someone had pressed a cool stone to her chest for an instant.

Truth be told, she was not as confident as she made herself seem. Arisa had probably discerned that already, judging by the way her eyes lingered on Kasumi before returning to gazing at the stars. Sometimes Kasumi felt as if Arisa could read her mind sometimes, like when she was trying and failing to put her feelings into words. Arisa almost always understood.

So really, there was no point in trying to hide her honest feelings. If she kept them to herself, she would crack and chip like an old plate. And if she did, Arisa would likely find out anyway.

“Well,” she finally said, getting Arisa’s attention again. “I’m not totally confident, but I still believe in it. The five of us are too close to abandon each other just like that. And nothing’s happened recently that would make any of us want to quit the band.”

“Nothing needs to happen with this kind of thing.” Arisa sighed. “Do you think Rimi was joking around when she said she wanted to go overseas?” Kasumi shook her head. “And O-Tae too?” She shook her head again. “Maybe we do all love the band right now. Maybe we’ll all still love the band a year from now, when the three of you are off doing your own thing far away. But just because you love something, it doesn’t mean you’ll think about it every waking hour. You and Tae might have a lot of fun in Shizuoka, and you’ll think about us once in a while, but you can’t think about us all the time. You’re going to find new things to love. That’s just how it is.”

With nobody in the kitchen and nobody outside, total silence fell over the porch after Arisa finished. A low, intermittent howl filled the void from wind sweeping across the roofs of neighboring houses.

Kasumi was about to tell Arisa that she was wrong when a brooding thought stayed her tongue. Arisa had a good point: Nobody could think about something all the time. An image of Rimi, alone in some foreign dormitory, breezing through encounters in a language other than Japanese occurred to her. Then one of herself and Tae, standing before a busy city with their guitar straps over their shoulders. Arisa’s keyboard and Saya’s drum set sitting in the basement, dusted and maintained despite there being no melody to accompany them.

All of a sudden, a pang of loneliness struck her, as if she were already on the hour-long train ride to a place 180 kilometers away from home.

Her throat felt blocked as she started talking again. “You know,” she began quietly, “I didn’t know what to do when Rimi-rin said she was going overseas. It was like my head stopped working. I couldn’t say anything. I thought she didn’t want to be in the band anymore, and that was why she waited until then to tell us. I thought, maybe it was because I messed things up and didn’t get into the College of Music—”

“You didn’t mess up,” Arisa interjected. Her face was set and her lips were straight, but her eyes had softened. Kasumi gave her a grateful smile and went on.

“I knew that Rimi-rin would probably come back after she was done with school. But I was so afraid that she would leave, and when she came back, we wouldn’t be the same as before. Not literally the same, but like... like we won’t all have the same feelings toward the band anymore. You know what I mean?”

Arisa nodded in response.

“And then O-Tae said she was going to commit to the school in Shizuoka, and that made me think the same thing again. That since I had messed up, she was going with her second plan, since we couldn’t all be together anyway. I felt like the band was breaking up right in front of me, and I just... I didn’t know what to do. I was panicking really badly.

“That’s when I thought, there has to be something I can do. Some way I can make sure the band always feels the same way. So the first thing that came to mind was, if I went with O-Tae, I could make sure she always remembered what it felt like to be part of the band. That super sparkling, heart pounding feeling. I wasn’t thinking at all about how I would be leaving you or Saya behind, I just wanted to... to keep O-Tae with us.”

The whole time while Kasumi was speaking, Arisa never looked away. In fact, she didn’t even move; that was how much she seemed to be paying attention. When Kasumi was done, and while her words were still floating in the brisk night air, she looked to Arisa. That was when those light brown eyes dropped away and found something in the floorboards to focus on.

Arisa’s voice was low even considering how quiet of a night it was. Kasumi had to lean in to hear her.

“You aren’t wrong for seeing it that way,” Arisa said. Then, catching herself, she spoke up and went, “Um, hey. Listen... I know I’m the one who said Rimi and O-Tae were taking this seriously, but... I’ll guarantee you they’re having second thoughts right about now. There’s no way we would all be together now if they didn’t love the band as much as you do. So.”

Arisa gave a long pause. The night didn’t stir, nor did Kasumi as she swallowed and tried to remain as still as she could. She could tell there was something on the tip of Arisa’s tongue that she was trying hard to put into careful words.

“Things might not work out perfectly,” Arisa finally said with a glance in her direction, “but they will work out.” Her face seemed conflicted, as if she were trying to reassure Kasumi and convince herself at the same time.

Kasumi nodded and turned away, hiding the expression she knew she was making that was nothing like herself. Anxiety lingered in her head like half-erased pencil marks. But as Arisa had said, maybe Rimi and Tae were thinking of the band. Maybe they were thinking about it at this very moment, wherever they were. Maybe they would change their minds, and everything—almost everything, she corrected remembering her admittance situation—would be okay.

The stars came into focus as she picked out a cluster of lights in the bottom right part of the sky. They weren’t part of another constellation as far as she knew, but they caught her eye nonetheless. She counted four at first, but when she squinted, a fifth came into view. It was faint, and it might have been smaller than the others, but it was definitely right there next to them in the sky.

_And if they don’t reconsider?_ went a stray, pessimistic thought. Rimi could be such a determined person; if she was set on going overseas, what then? And Tae hardly ever said something she didn’t mean; if she really committed to going to Shizuoka, what then? In that case, would Kasumi actually follow her?

She bit her lip and stopped herself from worrying by closing her eyes and focusing on her breathing. Gently in, gently out. Suddenly, the other thing Arisa had said just now reached her again like an echo: things would work out.

The tension faded from her muscles. “Arisa?” she asked, her voice coming out as a whisper that was nearly blown away in the wind. “I want to make you a new promise. One that I’ll keep for sure this time.”

Arisa met her eyes and asked, “What is it?”

Knowing full well that what she was about to say went against the type of person she was, Kasumi cleared her throat softly. “I know I act without thinking all the time. I’m bad at taking things slowly and figuring out the best thing to do. A lot of the time it works. But the other day, I tried to make things better by myself, and all I ended up doing was throwing you for a loop.

“So, I decided that I won’t ever make a decision like that without asking you first. I know I already rely on you all the time, but I want to be more open with you so that I don’t end up doing stupid things like that in the future. I’m not a super responsible leader, but I’m still trying to get better! And part of that is asking for help when I’m not sure what to do. I want to make sure you can count on me to be more responsible.” She patted herself on the chest, right where her collarbone met in the center. She wasn’t going to lie; saying this made her feel pretty proud of herself.

However, an uncomfortable expression had found its way to Arisa’s face. “I mean, it’s fine, really. You—” she started to say, but Kasumi cut her off.

“It’s not! Or well, I don’t think it is,” she added to hopefully not sound too rude. “You’re my best friend, Arisa. I count on you all the time. If you can’t rely on me to tell you what’s going on, then I can’t be a good friend for you too, right?”

Even though it was dark out, Kasumi could tell Arisa was embarrassed—score, she triumphed. A flustered Arisa was a cute Arisa.

Arisa mumbled something. “You’re my best friend too,” Kasumi believed she had heard, but Arisa went on before Kasumi could really be sure. “You already do a lot of things for me. It’s not like everyone is aware they’re a good friend. That’s just how these things work, right? It’s not as one-sided as you think.”

“Is it? What kind of things?” Kasumi asked. “I’m just curious.”

“Like, you know...” Arisa paused, then she cleared her throat and stood up. “I’ll tell you another time.”

Ignoring Kasumi’s complaints, she walked inside saying something over her shoulder about using the bath before it got too late. “It’s pretty dark,” she said offhandedly. “I don’t want you getting mugged, so if you want you can sleep over. Just let your mom know.”

“Yay!”

Kasumi turned her head, but Arisa had already mounted the stairs. Her footsteps faded away shortly, and she called out to her grandmother as she got ready to bathe.

After that, it was quiet again. Kasumi gave one last look to the sky, dark but populated with so many stars. And she knew there were plenty more she couldn’t see. Even though they didn’t show up to her now, she just had to accept that they were out there somewhere.

Floorboards creaked and the wind continued to sweep across roofs as she got to her feet and followed Arisa into the house. The bath, after all, had enough room for two, and she wanted in on it.

  



	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The dreams of spring and the sky of summer!  
> To those dazzling days...  
> To the love of autumn and to the path of winter!  
> I'm walking it!"

**Kasumi**

Hi everyone!!!  
I already told everyone about it at school but here’s a reminder  
come to arisa’s place at 5 today!  
can everyone still make it?

**Tae**

yup

**Saya**

I might be a little late (my bakery shift ends at 5) but if you don’t mind waiting, I’ll be there.

**Rimi**

I’ll be there! sorry for the late reply

**Kasumi**

that’s okay! see you all later!

Even though Kasumi had told the others to come at five, she stood in front of the locked gate to Arisa’s house almost an hour early. Anticipation had left her feeling too antsy to wait around. Asuka found it annoying when she walked in circles around the living room, so she had gone out for a walk. She had only meant to walk around a few blocks, but her feet had taken her on the familiar route to the train station, and out of habit she had boarded the train and disembarked in the neighborhood where Arisa lived.

Arisa’s front gate was closed shut. Though she had seen it countless times, her nerves felt like they were all crossed over and tangled up while she pressed the doorbell. When she had asked the others to come to Arisa’s house today, she had been purposefully vague. She had told them nothing beyond the fact that they needed to talk about “all this” that was going on.

Kasumi sighed a little and scuffed the pavement with her shoe. Leader stuff was hard. There were things she had to say and do. She did her best to say and do them, but like mastering an instrument, it wasn’t easy. Every now and then, it felt as if what she wanted conflicted with what was right, and she had to pick between one thing and another. Difficult choices came with the position. So did a lot of other things, like the first say in everything and tons of support from her friends. But leading the way was easy sometimes and stressful at other times.

Times like these made her wish someone else could step in for her. That someone else was there to call the shots she didn’t want to make herself. If that were the case, though, why shouldn’t that person have the right to lead when the going was good? Why should Kasumi enjoy herself if someone else shouldered with all the burden?

Shifting from foot to foot, she rang the doorbell again and waited for Arisa to let her in. Being a leader didn’t mean backing down when things were difficult. She probably wasn’t the best person for the job, but she would do it. All of it. Even if she didn’t want to face whatever was coming next, she would deal with it. She could, after all, do the best she could.

Kasumi’s hand sagged at the wrist, her finger still on the doorbell as if glued. She pressed it again, just in the event that Arisa hadn’t heard the first two times. There was always the possibility that Arisa wasn’t home right now, but she really hoped that wasn’t the case. She really wanted some company.

Arisa clicked her tongue and sighed. That made three times now. She could rehearse everything she wanted to say to the others up to a certain part, at which point she kept messing up and sounding like an idiot. Maybe she needed to back up a bit and try something else. There was an hour left before everyone was supposed to arrive, so something would probably come to her by then.

Practicing what she wanted to say was a regular habit of hers. Matters like this she treated seriously. Not everyone could be like Kasumi and spout whatever springs to mind in the spur of the moment. That was not to say Kasumi didn’t take things seriously; she did. They were, however, two very different people who handled the same situation in different ways.

Arisa was in the main room turning her phone over in her hands when the bell for the front gate rang. It made her jump; the bell always sounded louder when she was in the yard. Today especially, it seemed to be right by her ear.

“Are your friends here?” her grandmother asked, getting up not to answer the gate but to refill her glass of water from a pitcher in the kitchen. The answer to that question was what Arisa wanted to know. She said probably, and that she would go check.

Had the others arrived already? It was only four o’clock. They had agreed on meeting at five to talk about things, so that couldn’t be it. But it could be. Maybe one of them had gotten anxious.

After her momentary surprise, the bell rang again as she was getting up. And again, as she was making her way from the steps out to the gate. “Hello?” she called over the stone wall as she approached. Years of enjoying her own company had perfected her voice for dealing with strangers. “Who is this?”

A second later, Kasumi’s excited voice flew over the wall back at her, and Arisa sighed, surprised but rather relieved to hear her voice and not someone else’s. The last thing she had wanted today was a surprise visitor to entertain and be friendly for. However, and this she was thankful for, putting on a face was the last thing she needed to do around Kasumi.

Quickly tidying up her bangs, she walked up to the gate and lifted the latch. Kasumi didn’t sound like she was here for any sort of urgent reason, so she had probably just been excited or nervous. So excited or nervous that she arrived an hour ahead of schedule. Classic.

At least Arisa had someone to talk to as the time ticked down to five o’clock. The gate creaked open, and Kasumi waved and smiled at her as if nothing important were happening today. Just another day, another casual visit. Arisa returned the gesture and let her in, leaving the gate open.

“Just breathe, Rimi,” murmured Rimi to herself as she exited the train station. “Breathe and don’t be afraid.”

No matter how much she tried to calm herself down, her heart continued to race. She could feel its palpitations against her ribcage as if it were straining to get out of her chest. A rapid heartbeat was nothing out of the ordinary for her, her being an avid watcher of scary movies, but the way she felt now was different from when she sat in the dark watching a horror flick and hugging whichever friend sat next to her. Whereas anyone tall and dependable would have done in that scenario, the only person she wanted next to her right now was her sister. Rimi wanted to retreat into her arms and feel protected, for a moment in time, from all her troubles.

Unfortunately, she very well couldn’t do that at this moment. The idea of flying several thousand miles just to hug your sister was both touching and insane.

“ _Don’t be afraid,”_ Yuri would say to her those nights the world seemed to be pressing down on her. Those words, she murmured to Rimi years before she sang them on stage. Years before, when there was no one else but the two of them against some invisible fear.

Being scared and being afraid were two different things. Rimi often had to try to explain why she believed there was a difference whenever someone asked her why she liked horror movies so much. The bottom line, she figured out, was how she felt at the end of the day.

The comparison she made to explain her point was between scary movies and sad movies. Most people understood when she put it like that. Being scared was getting surprised or, alternatively, knowing something bad was going to happen and holding your breath only to be caught off guard anyway. You don’t want it to happen, but it hardly matters afterward, and most of the time it’s something to look back on and laugh about.

Being afraid was not knowing what was coming but holding your breath anyway. It was praying. Praying with all the faith you had that nothing bad would happen. That things would be still okay when the sun rose the next day. That you weren’t about to lose something or someone that mattered to you.

Right now, she was afraid.

Fourteen minutes from five, Rimi set out for Arisa’s house. Talking with her sister the other day hadn’t set her mind at ease. If anything, her nerves were stretched even tauter now. But it had opened her eyes, and because of her sister she saw a world of possibilities that she didn’t necessarily want to play out.

Before, she had only seen one end to the tunnel. Everything she had done in school up to graduation seemed to have been for the sole purpose of aiming even higher: for university, for being successful, for a happy life and a happy marriage. But there was more to her existence than those things alone. Nothing said she had to walk that straight, fixed path exactly. There were things she found important, and life didn’t give her nearly enough time to forget about them and come back later.

Very nearly she had turned down a road in a direction she wouldn’t be happy with. Her original plan for her future had been a stock ideal, planted in her mind by what was simply the norm for people like her—a well fed, well bred girl successful in school with healthy hobbies. It didn’t factor in the people she loved to be around or the things she really loved to do. It hadn’t, until now.

Now that she knew what she really wanted, Rimi wanted to set things right with her friends. Even if she was too late to change the outcome, it wasn’t too late to take back what she had said.

Winter had started to depart already. The sun wasn't as low in the sky today as it had been a few weeks ago. Tae knew that because she passed by Yamabuki Bakery every time she walked to Arisa's house from her own place, and today she could actually see the sun above the top of the building.

“How nice,” she remarked to herself. “Perfect.” When the sky was still bright around this time of day, the sunlight warmed instead of burned, relaxed instead of intensified. It was mild and also a bit orange. It set a great mood.

The street corner seemed a little busy today. A lot of people seemed to be hanging out or walking around, and that included a few students wearing Hanasakigawa uniforms. After exams, the seniors had become noticeably more laidback. More students spent their after schools around the city with their friends. It reminded Tae of the way her rabbits hopped around and played in groups after eating. Humans and rabbits were both social animals after all.

Tae stopped in front of the bakery and squatted down. With the back of her hand, she dusted a portion of the sidewalk before setting her guitar case on the ground. Inside her case was a paper sign affixed to some cardboard and, of course, her guitar.

After closing her case and setting the sign up on top of it, she straightened up with her guitar strap over her shoulder. Save for two girls she recognized as her classmates, nobody paid her any attention. Tae waved at them and, after clearing her throat and checking that her guitar was tuned, started to play.

As soon as Saya cracked open the door, Tae's voice drifted inside the bakery like a well-timed gust of wind. In accompaniment was her guitar, warm and buttery, her playing as smooth as ever. Tae was playing something Saya had never heard before, a song she must have just written, or written and never shared. Each chord she struck melted before the next. Every pass of her hands across the strings produced a clear, uplifting sound.

“—won't let our dreams go, but let them show, whoa oh oh oh!”

Tae’s last note resonated for such a long time that it seemed like everyone on the street corner held their breath waiting for it to end. It could have lasted forever until Tae pressed a finger over her strings and brought it to a halt as if she were zipping up her jacket pocket. The small crowd she had gathered started to clap, and Saya joined in. Tae heard her over the rest and turned around.

“There she is,” she said, pointing her pick at Saya. “She’s my best friend.” A few people laughed, others waved. Saya caught the ball and waved back, standing in front of the bakery door with her arms crossed, which was what she saw the other shopkeepers on her street do when they were opening in the morning. Something about holding yourself proudly and wearing your brightest smile, her dad often told her, always attracted customers.

“Thank you all for listening! Please support my friend and buy yourself something to eat. All her buns are very good.”

The crowd dispersed, and a few of them entered the bakery to do just that. Saya waited as Tae packed her guitar back into its case before walking over to her.

“Thanks for the surprise performance,” Saya said. Tae glowed from the compliment. “It really did help us pull in some customers.”

“Sure. It was fun being part of the family business.” Tae tilted her head toward the corner of the street, vaguely in the direction of Arisa’s house. “Ready to go? We can walk together.”

Saya nodded. “Let's go.”

They set out. The door to the bakery, still open, let out her father’s voice as he greeted and talked to customers. It had a shopkeeper’s bell on the inside, small and silver with straight sides, and it let out a jingle as the breeze picked up for a moment. Saya shivered as the wind skimmed her arms and legs before it rushed away.

The bell chimed a few more times, gentler and gentler with each, before settling back into place. The street had a few seconds of calm before the noise of conversation and wind resumed anew. While Saya walked, her mind naturally went to the band and three other friends, who were likely already at Arisa’s house. In a miserable attempt to warm herself up, she ran a hand over her arm and squeezed where she felt goosebumps, as if to smooth them all out.

“By the way,” Tae said not too long after they started. “Why don't you ask Moca if she’ll come out and perform too? She’s one of your biggest supporters. And I’d like to play guitar with her.”

Saya swiftly snapped out of her thoughts. “Oh, that’s a good idea. I guess I’ll pay her in bread?”

“Probably. Do I get paid too, or is it community service for me?”

“Haha, of course. Just come by anytime I’m on shift, and you can take your pick!”

* * *

Saya and Tae arrived to an open gate and the other three members of their band lazing about on the other side. Arisa spotted them as they stepped onto the lawn. She stood up quickly, brushing grass off the seat of her pants. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey!” Kasumi and Rimi stood up as well and echoed the greeting.

“Hello.” Saya and Tae came to a stop and returned the greeting. “Sorry we’re late,” Saya apologized.

“It’s fine,” Arisa told her.

The conversation lacked any sort of potential for a natural transition and left the five of them facing each other with nothing to say. They stood around giving each other hesitant looks before Arisa cleared her throat. Stumbling over her words a little at first, she went, “So, do we want to go to the basement?”

Everyone nodded and followed her into the unlocked warehouse. Arisa bent down, hefted open the trap door, and was the first one down into the darkness.

“Leave it open,” she said from below just as Tae was about to pull the hatch closed behind her. “It’ll get hot down here otherwise.” Then she flipped the light switch, and everyone could see again.

Even though Arisa’s basement had grown increasingly comfier over the years, Saya’s nerves prevented her from relaxing at all. She envied Kasumi, who had already settled in next to her on the sofa legs folded, pillow in lap and all. A quick look around told her the others were on edge too. Arisa’s eyes met hers for a split second before she went back to rearranging clutter on the table. Rimi bit her lip, and Kasumi wore an anxious expression. As for Tae, her discomfort wasn't as visible, but she might have been sitting straighter than usual instead of leaning back into the couch like she always did.

Nobody said anything, and silence took over again. Saya tapped her fingers on her thigh and listened to Tae hum a familiar tune—one of Poppin’Party’s songs, though whichever the name of it eluded her right now.

Saya wasn’t sure if she liked it being so quiet between them. Even at home, she could usually hear her younger siblings in their room next to hers. Over her entire life she had become accustomed to the noise of her family living alongside her, and noise was what she had come to expect from being around others, especially with Kasumi and company. Kasumi was talkative to a fault, after all, and the five of them could talk for hours about the smallest thing.

All of a sudden, Saya felt the drive to take initiative. Not in the same way Kasumi took initiative, which was by standing up and shouting something like “Alright everyone!”, but to say something and get over this silence already. It was a drive that came from some deep, intrinsic guilt that she had never quite stopped feeling.

The last time she had taken initiative, set her foot down and been resolute for once, her entire band of friends had been fast to accommodate her. She didn’t want to apply to any school she couldn’t attend while living at home? They didn’t apply to any school she couldn’t attend while living at home. And because she had said that, their search radius for universities had been confined to Tokyo. Three measly schools. Maybe things would have turned out differently if she had been more open to moving out. They might have had more than three choices, and they might not have had to split up.

So, it was only right that she be resolute again, be the first one to step up and speak her mind. Right?

Saya raised her head and took a deep breath. But before any words could leave her mouth, Rimi beat her to the punch.

“I’m sorry everyone.” Rimi underestimated the carry of her voice in the small room and seemed embarrassed. She lowered her volume. “I know I shocked you when I said I wanted to go overseas. I should have told you a long time go. But at the time, I thought it would be better to wait for a little bit. Then a little bit became a lot, and eventually I started feeling like there was no way I could say anything.”

Rimi swallowed before going on. “I think the main reason I was too scared to say anything was because... I guess I knew you would all encourage me to do it. To follow my dreams. I thought if I told you I was thinking about studying abroad, you would all push me to try it. Right?” One by one, starting with Kasumi and ending with Arisa, they all nodded. “I think, deep down, I didn’t want to go. Maybe I was hoping you would try to stop me from going.”

Rimi stopped. In the middle of her last sentence, she had hesitated for a split second and her voice had shrunk. She seemed as if she were about to cry at any moment. Tae, the closest to her, placed a hand on her shaking shoulder by way of encouragement.

“Then I talked with my sister,” she continued in a lower voice. “She’s almost done with her second year abroad. And she told me that being separated from her band is difficult. Sometimes she really wants to talk to them, but they’re sleeping when she’s awake, and she’s busy while they’re awake. I thought before that things like phones and computers made it easy to keep in touch, but she told me it isn’t as easy as it seems.

“I love being a part of Poppin’Party,” Rimi said. She raised her eyes and made eye contact with each and every one of them, as if to strengthen her statement. “If I were in her situation, I wouldn’t like being so far away from you all. I like talking to you and seeing you all everyday.

“Talking with her also made me realize I wasn’t chasing my own dreams. I wasn’t making the right choice for myself. So I made my own decision.” Rimi raised her voice slightly. Her words had a certain strength to them that Saya respected. “I’m not going to study abroad. It took me a while to realize it, but the band is more important to me than anything else. Everyone... I’m sorry I caused so much trouble.”

As soon as her second apology left her lips, Kasumi had left Saya’s side and sat down next to Rimi.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” she said, gripping Rimi’s hand. “Even if you really were going to go away for a few years, you still wouldn’t need to be sorry.We’re Poppin’Party, right? We’re friends? We cause trouble for each other, but we always support each other too. Which is why we’ll always support you, forever, no matter what!”

 _Exactly,_ Saya was about to add on when Arisa’s loud sigh from across the table took everyone’s attention. Unlike Kasumi, she stayed in her seat, crossed her legs, and spoke across the room.

“Why is it always ‘always’ and ‘forever’ with you, Kasumi?” she asked, to which Kasumi only grinned. “But she’s right, Rimi, and so are you. We would have cheered you on no matter what you did. But I’m kind of glad you chose us in the end. I would have missed you.”

“I would have missed you too,” Saya said. Four pairs of eyes turned to her, and she nearly forgot what she wanted to say. “And not just you. Everyone here means a lot to me. To be honest, if any of you were to leave, I would probably never get over it.”

Arisa gave her a tender look. “Saya...”

Saya nodded and smiled to remind herself to keep moving on. “I know I usually don’t push my own opinion much, but when we were talking about our plans, I decided to be selfish for once. I wanted to stay here, with everything I loved nearby. My family, my bands, my other friends, all here in Tokyo... I hoped it would work out that way. But even if that was what I wanted, I couldn’t ever say it out loud, because it just wasn’t realistic. I mean, making the four of you potentially give upon what you want just so I could have you all conveniently at the center of my world? I could never do that. I want you all to be happy, but I still want us to be together... I felt like it would be wrong of me to try and convince you otherwise.”

While she was talking, her eyes traveled downward until she was looking at the carpet. She felt like she had just tried to form words with a piece of sandpaper. Spilling her mind in front of a group wasn’t the easiest of things for her, but she had plenty of time to work on it.

Tae’s voice followed hers in the reflective silence after. “We all have to be selfish sometimes,” she said, surprisingly calm. “I think everything will work out though. Now that Rimi is staying, I don’t really want to go to Shizuoka anymore. It would have been nice to expand my horizons, but I have plenty of time to do that. I get a lot more out of being with Popipa. Like memories, and music, and food sometimes.”

Tae glanced at Arisa, who looked away. She smiled. “Sorry for scaring you all. Especially you, Kasumi.”

By now, Kasumi was crying so loudly that it was a miracle she had even heard Tae. And honestly, even though Saya wasn’t bawling like her, she felt the same way inside.

“It’s fine,” Kasumi blubbered through her hands. “We’re all together now, so... so it’s okay! Things really did work out. They really did.”

Her voice lifted at the end to a happy trill. At that moment, relief seemed to spread throughout the whole room. Saya felt her heart lighten, and in spite of herself her eyes started to feel warm. Arisa and Tae were the only ones holding themselves together, and even at that Arisa looked like she was about to cry too. But now that their futures looked intertwined again, all the crying going on right now was the touched sort. The kind that fills the space left behind after letting go of a huge weight.

Even though half of them were emotional wrecks—they must have been a sight to see, five almost-young-adults in tears over friendship and togetherness—Saya couldn’t help but be happy that they were all crying for the same reason. They all wanted the same thing in the end, and that was to keep making music with each other. That had been obscured for a bit, by reality and ironically their own attempts to make the right choices for themselves. But now, it seemed clear that between branching out and staying with the band, the band had won.

“Stop crying, Kasumi,” Arisa said, trying to hold it in but obviously weakening by the second. “You’re gonna make me... god, damn it...”

These were the people Saya wanted to spend her life with, she thought as Arisa covered her face and Kasumi started to drag everyone together for a group hug, or group cry. Maybe right now, she wasn’t quite ready, but in the future, wherever they went she would go too. Whatever goals they set, she would reach with them. There were a lot of things she needed to work on until reaching that point, but with their help, her chances looked pretty good.

* * *

Just barely able to see over the top of her granddaughter's head, and the heads of her friends all gathered around her in an embrace that left no room between them, Mami Ichigaya drew back from the door of the warehouse with a smile. When she had first heard Kasumi crying all the way from the living room, a motherly instinct had obliged her to check in on the girls and see if anything was wrong. However, it appeared she had nothing to worry about. What she heard and imagined was nothing like what she saw now: the tender moments following resolution, a happy crybaby, a cagey girl, and all their best friends.

Mami carried a soft tune in the back of the throat as she went back into the house. Her soft laughter rose into the air and folded into the wind, and the sign of springtime on its way lifted her mood. It was about time she start planning and making a few phone calls. Graduation parties didn’t throw themselves.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The days of youth that feel like they're pouring down,  
> It's sparkling and shining,  
> It's dazzling; it always will be.  
> It's heartrending..."

Lights wreathed the branches of the cherry trees on both sides of the boulevard leading up to the Tsurumaki’s mansion. Coming up the walk, shadows shifted underfoot like skittish fish in shallow water. Adorned in new pink blossoms, the trees were beautiful in their own right. Standing beneath them now, the strings of bulb-shaped yellow lights threaded through their branches stirred memories of festival lanes and summer nights.

But all that was only the scenery. Before the fountain, by the trees left of the path, more than twenty people congregated around tables and picnic blankets, carrying plates and trays and tying balloons and adjusting streamers between tree trunks. Voices cut easily through the placid night air, but an indistinct buzz of conversation kept any from standing out among the rest. For all the energy and motion, the cheerful babble and liveliness, the entire universe seemed to have centered itself around this group in this place, at this moment.

The five girls of Poppin’Party, accompanied by their four classmates from Hanasakigawa—Misaki, Kokoro, Eve, and Hagumi—were the last to arrive. Their excited voices died down as they approached the huge gathering of people and tables lined with dishes and desserts.

Surprisingly, it was reserved Kanon who kicked off the party. She had a tray stacked high with spring rolls in one hand, and with her other she was trying to make room at the end of a completely laden table. In the year she had been gone from Hanasakigawa, her arms and legs had grown a little longer; her eyes had become sharper and more emphatic. So caught up in what she was doing, she looked up and noticed the nine girls walking up to her and started with a gasp. One of the spring rolls tumbled out of the tray and fell onto the grass, crispy pieces chipping off its corner.

Au fond, she was still the same old Kanon.

“Ah, they’re here!” she exclaimed. Heads turned, and within seconds cheers erupted from the people near her, and it swiftly spread to the rest of the crowd.

Next to Kanon, Kaoru gestured and gave a theatric sigh. “A magnificent homecoming,” she murmured, though literally nobody could hear her over the cheering.

“Kaoru!” Kokoro soon noticed her, though, and ran over. “Whose idea was this? This is wonderful! Everyone is smiling! Even Misaki!”

“Ah... Would that I had seen her. Her displays of joy are one of the most fleeting things in this universe. But anyway, in answer to your question, look not to me but all around”—she lifted her hand and made an imprecise circling motion—“at these loving caretakers and guardians, who conspired together to deliver a surprise unto you and your fellow friends.”

“Oh!” Kokoro turned to the nearest person and smiled. “Thank you!” That person happened to be Saya’s father, and though he hardly knew her, she was so heartfelt that he felt it sincere and had to smile back.

One of the other parents, whose hands were full, bumped into Kaoru and nearly fell over, apologizing. Gallant as ever, Kaoru turned and offered her assistance. Just like that, she was gone doing something else, and Kanon was left to finish explaining. “Um,” she began, licking her lips to buy herself time, “even though we’re at Kokoro’s house, everything here was prepared by the parents... The suits offered to take care of everything, but the parents insisted on doing it themselves.”

The graduating Hanajo Girls, as they were named on a banner by the fountain (it read “Congratulations Hanajo Girls!”), melted into the crowd like a wave onto a beach. They learned quickly that when Kanon had said everything, she had meant everything. The party had been almost all the parents’ doing, from food and decoration to bringing their own tables and setting up in Kokoro’s front yard—with the suits’ permission, of course.

Asuka tried explaining this to Kasumi before her older sister could jump to conclusions, but to no avail.

“This is so cool, Aa-chan!” Kasumi said, squeezing her little sister in a tight hug. “Thank you so much!”

“I told you, all I did was help with the tables! If you wanna go thank someone, go hug Mom. Geez.”

“And you too, Rokka!” Before Rokka could bat an eye, Kasumi had let go of Asuka and moved onto her, catching her in an equally intimate embrace. A couple of nervous noises escaped Rokka’s lips. Her hands flailed as if she didn’t know what to do with them until Kasumi released her and went to go give her mother a hug.

Asuka shared a look with Rokka, both sympathetic and empathetic. After a moment, their mutual embarrassment eventually turned into a smile, and they broke into laughter.

The other girls had both similar and not so similar interactions with their own familiar faces. Everyone had at least one representative from their family, and all of Hello Happy World was present too. From Pastel*Palettes, Aya and Hina had shown to congratulate Eve.

“Chisato and Maya are busy today,” Aya told her when asked about the missing two. Eve’s face fell, and Aya rushed to comfort her. “Hey, don’t worry! They’ll be at the other—”

But she stopped suddenly, and her hand flew to her mouth. Eve looked at her, a confused and curious expression on her face. Hina gave Aya a questioning look.

“Wasn’t that supposed to be a secret for now?” Hina said, as if Eve wasn’t standing right there.

A squeak slipped between Aya’s fingers. She lowered her hand and cleared her throat. “Nothing,” she said calmly. “They might show up later today, is what I meant.” It was a bang-up job of a cover-up, but thankfully Eve didn’t question her any further about the private party they had planned at the agency.

Rimi had just finished getting her food when she noticed Kasumi and Tae talking to Eve right across the table.

“And so, all five of us are staying in Tokyo!” Kasumi was telling Eve about what had happened with Poppin’Party. Tae nodded along with the conversation, though as Rimi walked up to them, she started to frown a bit. “The only problem is, O-Tae doesn’t have a school to go to...”

“You tried your best, Tae-san,” Eve consoled her. “A true warrior always suffers defeat but only strives harder to improve!”

“I don’t wanna be a true warrior then,” Tae said. Rimi laughed, and the three looked to her.

“Hi Kasumi-chan, O-Tae-chan, Eve-chan,” she said. Tae walked up to her and put both her hands on her shoulders as if she were about to kiss her.

“Rimi-rin,” she said, with a pause for emphasis. “What should I do?”

“About?”

“Not getting into university.”

Rimi held her plate of food steady as she thought about it. She had filled her plate expecting to go back for seconds, so she had sampled the things she thought she would like. Just some stir-fried chow mein with vegetables, a deep-fried wonton, beef chow fun, a crab cake, pineapple fried rice, spaghetti that Saya’s mom had cooked, pasta salad with sundried tomatoes, a fried chicken wing, half an egg roll, a few pieces of sushi, one shrimp tempura, and a cube of honeydew melon. You know, _party food_.

“Why not just take a gap year?” Rimi finally said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of other people do the same thing.” In Japan, a lot of high-school students were so strongly fixated on getting into a specific school that if they failed to get in, they would spend a full year studying for next year’s entrance exams. Fittingly, they were called—

“Ronin!” The word burst from Eve, who stepped forward with a fire in her eyes. “I read about this when doing my samurai research! Back in the day, ronin were wandering samurai without their masters who worked as mercenaries or became hoodlums. In modern times, the term is for people who’ve been laid off from work or school! Tae-san”—Eve addressed Tae with an air of grand reveal, and an infinite passion in her cool blue eyes—“you can be a ronin!”

“Huh? I guess so.”

“From today on, your new task is to train hard until you’re worthy to claim your entrance into the Tokyo College of Music so you can be with your friends!”

Tae snapped to attention. “Y-yes!” she stammered. “I will!”

“Bushido!” Eve cried, throwing her hands up.

“Bushido!” echoed Tae, and Kasumi, doing the same. “But yeah,” she said turning to Rimi, “a gap year sounds like a good idea. Thanks, Rimi. I’ll work hard so I can keep being with you all.”

Having done her part, Rimi nodded and smiled and slipped away to go find a conversation partner she could keep up with as she ate. The trio were already moving on to talk about something else, and Rimi had a feeling it was bound to get chaotic and stay chaotic. Misaki and Kanon had to be around here somewhere...

By the time everyone had finished mixing with other people and getting food, the party had started splitting off into small groups of people who sat together at tables or on picnic blankets. Groups of parents sat here and there, and the suits had claimed an empty space for themselves where they could wait on Kokoro in case anything occurred. The grassy premises of the Tsurumaki residence were extraordinarily spacious, so the blankets were laid out with plenty of space between them. Starting with Rimi and Misaki, the nine girls who had just graduated all ended up sitting with each other on a baby-blue blanket closest to the fountain in the middle of the grounds.

The excitement and desire to talk had worn off. A calmer feeling emerged in its place, even mellowing some of the more energetic members of their group like Kasumi and Hagumi. In the case of Kokoro and Eve, they were still carrying on a conversation about graduation traditions and how wonderful spring was, but they were the exception. A content silence formed, separating them from the boisterous laughter of their parents and animated talk from their other friends.

They had sat like this before, two years ago, because of what had simply been a chance encounter. The differences between now and then made it seem like a distant memory, but Arisa could point out a few. The amazing (and somewhat frightening) variety of food. The pink trees. The gurgle of the fountain, and the vastness of the Tsurumaki property that still astounded her today.

Hagumi seemed to also be thinking about the same thing. “Do you guys remember when we did this the first time?” she asked. “The cherry blossoms were out, and so we came to Kokoron’s place to see them.”

Her description of it made Misaki nod. “I remember. It was pretty much pure coincidence that Ichigaya-san and the others happened to come along, then... and here we are again, doing the same thing.”

Hagumi pumped her fist. A deep-fried meat skewer from her family’s own shop dangled from her fingers. “Yeah! And it just so happened we all went to the same school. None of us knew each other very well back then, but that was when we learned more about each other and became better friends.”

As soon as the conversation turned toward that day, Arisa turned her attention to her plate of food. It was starting to look like a good time to finish it, before it got cold, so she tore a piece off a chicken skewer, shoveled some yakisoba into her mouth, and washed it down with water.

Eve chimed in across from Hagumi. “If we hadn’t all been in the same place at the same time, it might have taken longer for us to become good friends. It’s a good thing Kokoro-san brought us all together that day!”

At that Arisa paused and frowned. “Wait, no,” she interjected, unable to help herself. “I’m pretty sure Kasumi was the one who suggested it.”

Kasumi cocked her head. “Really? I don’t remember doing anything like that...”

“You were literally the first to run over and struck up a conversation, and within a minute we were planning to have a party in front of Kokoro’s house.”

After a few seconds of racking her brain, Kasumi said, finally, “I think I remember that. Was it while we were walking home?”

“Yes, and we saw Eve swinging a sword around. Trying to cut a petal mid-air.” Arisa shot Eve a glance. “You remember that at least, right Eve?”

But, much to Arisa’s dread, Eve hesitated and looked up at the glowing underside of the cherry trees. Frustration incoming—Arisa braced herself. “Maybe... most likely? I’m trying to remember where I was that day. I’ve made my warrior training so second nature that I can’t remember every place I train.”

Arisa groaned. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter anyway. Let’s just—” But whatever she had been about to suggest never left her mouth, for Eve talked right over her.

“It does! That was the first of our days as good friends. If it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have gotten to know the real Arisa-san!”

Everyone present went silent for a reflective moment as Eve’s words stirred up more detailed memories of the party. Everyone, except for Arisa, who put her near-empty plate of food down slowly. “Hold on,” she said, doing her best to deflect everyone else’s attention. “You’re just, uh... thinking of something else, maybe? Probably the day at school, when we had... the... festival thing, the sports one?”

Then, Saya stabbed her in the back. “No, I’m pretty sure that was it. As soon as someone suggested having a party at her house, she couldn’t hold it in any longer.”

“Saya!”

But the damage was done. Arisa hid her face in her hands as she, sitting in front of the Tsurumaki family mansion once again, became the talk of the party for a few minutes. And not for her radiant musical or academic accomplishments, either. Just for her personality.

“I hate parties,” she mumbled, the exact same thing that had crossed her mind that day as well.

In spite of her mortal shame, after a few minutes the topic moved on. The talk was so free and casual that it surprised her; since they had all just graduated from high school, she would have thought the subject matter would mostly be about future stuff. Jobs, universities, living alone. But none of those questions came up, or no one wanted to bring them up; they just enjoyed the people and the food, the present day and the present time.

When it started to get colder, and she was about to suggest they wrap it up and go home for the night, a squadron of black-clad Tsurumaki agents brought out heat lamps and set them up all about the area. It took no more than a minute for them to finish their jobs and go back to munching on macarons, meringues, and jelly dessert cubes.

The big circle the Hanajo Girls had formed broke up into a loose collection of girls gathered around heat lamps in twos and threes, and the party marched onward. Any uneaten food—there was quite a bit—was covered, and all the trash was taken away, but the party guests stayed out on the lawn, huddled around heat lamps like campers in a snowfield. And they continued chatting about... nothing overly important, to be honest.

Arisa mostly listened to her friends and classmates talking. She and Kasumi had their own heat lamp not too far from the others, and Kasumi was deep into some untraceable conversation with Hagumi and Kokoro just across the way.

The sun was long gone. Above them, the flower petals had changed colors, from a springtime pink and white to a more orangish hue, like candlelit gold.

“This house is crazy,” she murmured, half to Kasumi and half to herself. Kasumi heard her speaking and glanced toward her, but Arisa shook her head and laid down so she could keep looking at the trees. A steady murmur replaced her friends’ individual voices as she relaxed.

Everything that happened here was so crazy, she thought. But if it all went away all of a sudden, she would probably be left to wonder where it went. It had all become a part of her life: the constant interruptions, the unexpected detours. Friends and chaos seemed to be intertwined, sadly. At least in her case, there was no one or the other. Only yes and yes.

The gallon-sized heat lamp Kokoro’s caretakers had placed on the grass looked like an old-fashioned lantern. It had a black steel hood that could be pulled down in case anyone ever wanted to cover the dim, orange light. The surface wasn’t hot to the touch. Rather, it had a texture like flour but with the warmth of fresh bread. In running her hand over it, she left no fingerprints.

Rubbing the lamp, she closed her eyes and enjoyed the warmth and subdued buzz of conversation. A few seconds later, she felt someone moving nearby. She opened one eyelid to peek and saw that it was only Kasumi scooting closer.

“Are you sleepy Arisa?” Arisa responded by shaking her head. “Your eyes are closed,” Kasumi teased, annoying as ever.

“Mmrgh,” Arisa told her and heard a soft giggle in return. She ran her hand along the base of the heat lamp to see if there was some switch to adjust the temperature, because she was feeling a little warmer all of a sudden.

She must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing she knew people were standing up and all she could see with half of her cheek pressed into the grass were their shoes and legs.

Among the jumble of words that followed, she heard “Goodbye” often as well as “Good night!” as the legs and shoes began to move about. There were some thank yous too, and someone was talking about leftovers when Kasumi started pulling at her.

“Arisa,” she heard, “time to go.”

Too tired to comply, Arisa let her pull unsuccessfully until she gave up. Not too long after, she felt Kasumi put a hand around her back and behind her knees and pull a bit, and she ignored that as well. But then she was lifted clear of the ground, which jolted her awake immediately.

“Hey!” She protested, looked up, and saw Tae raise an eyebrow at her. “I’m fine, put me down.”

“Okay, if you say so.” Tae started lowering her back to the ground. Arisa felt very high above the ground, since Tae was so tall. “You can walk, right?”

Arisa was about to nod when laziness got the better of her. All she wanted to do was sleep for a little while longer. And Tae was pretty strong.

“Wait.” She stopped her and grabbed at her sleeve. “It’s... dark. And I’m a little tired.”

Tae smiled then and made sure Arisa was secure in her arms before standing up again. The lights twinkled where the stars would have been usually. Tae paused for a moment, and even though Arisa couldn’t see for herself, she could tell that the rest of their group—Saya, Rimi, and Kasumi—were standing nearby. Something in her friend’s face just gave it away. A subtle glint, like the spark of satisfaction from seeing something in its proper place.

The last thing she heard before her eyes closed was Tae’s voice, somewhere overhead.

“Okay. Time for Popipa to go home.”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ☆★End★☆
> 
>   
> In trying to come up with these notes, I've realized why authors place their acknowledgements at the very beginning of a book, before the book even begins. Leaving an author's note here makes me feel like I'm only taking up space, space that I would rather give wholly to the conclusion of a story I've poured my time and thoughts into. It makes me feel like an apology is in order, not only to myself and my story for spoiling the finality of the ending, but to you who has read this far only to end up reading about me instead of Poppin'Party.
> 
> Yet, at the same time, between when I started uploading Poppin'Onwards and now, when I've finished, I've experienced so much that I don't think anything I could've written back then would have meant as much to me as what I write now. If you don't mind reading a little bit more, I have a few more things to say.
> 
> This story is a projection of my own life experiences (like many other stories out there). When I uploaded the first chapter, my high-school graduation was two months away; today, it's two months in the past. Not all of what happens with Poppin'Party in this story has happened to me, though, and that holds true of all works of fiction (note: _fiction_ ). Different people view the same thing from different angles, as well as try to achieve the same thing through different methods. Kasumi, Arisa, Rimi, Tae, and Saya have too many differences to count, but when the dust settles, what shows is that they share the same goal.
> 
> BanG Dream! is such an important franchise to me now that it's almost scary. At one point, I wouldn't have believed I had it in me to love something so much, or to love so many things by proxy. I'm so much more appreciative of music and instruments and the production of it, of art and the process people have with drawing, of how I brush shoulders constantly with people who have talent or dedication or both. I'm literally learning how to love things more, and somehow my specific love for this franchise has given me even more things to love. Including a whole bunch of people that are immensely special to me.
> 
> Mealaud, who reads my fanfiction because I enjoy writing it and few reasons other than that. You're literally one of my favorite humans on this planet.
> 
> Shidi and Rae, who quite openly support my creative endeavors (in some embarrassing ways sometimes). I love talking to you two, and I'd love to make a habit of it!
> 
> Nujum, who plugs my work before I can even say "I did a thing" and created the [Kasumi Discord server](https://discord.gg/sNWMGhY) which is one of my favorite places to hang out. You're great, and I'm glad to have met you in this digital expanse; let's continue being pals.
> 
> Soran, who asked me out of nowhere if I would like to meet a group of people who'd become some of my most amazing friends—it wasn't quite worded that way, but that's how I feel about the result. I'd be somewhere else if you hadn't reached out to me back then. [stan soran](https://i.imgur.com/BxMYxN1.mp4)
> 
> Finally, literally everyone who's left a review or talked to me about writing and stories and fanfiction. Remember that even something as simple as a four-word compliment can make someone happy, and something so thoughtful as a (polite) suggestion can help someone improve.
> 
> Thank you for reading. Let's "Keep on Moving!", onwards and upwards.


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